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By Manoj Nadkarni The idea that Gross National Happiness (GNH) is more important than Gross National Product (GNP) is the cornerstone of development in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Manoj Nadkarni travelled to Bhutan to find out whether GNH is indeed a better measure of a country and its people than economic indices. This is the first of his despatches
Reaching Thimpu, capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan , was quite an endeavour. A 40-hour train journey took me from Mumbai to New Jalpaiguri in Siliguri district of West Bengal. The train reached at 2:30 in the morning. From the station – where even at that early hour taxis were soliciting passengers to Gangtok, Guwahati, Pokhara, Kathmandu and Phuntsholing – I took a bus to Jaigaon. It is a typical ugly small Indian industrial town, with potholed roads, trash lying around, half-completed buildings already occupied by businesses and masses of tangled phone and electricity lines. At one end of a congested street in the town stands a huge Tibetan gate which indicates the border; on the other side is Phuntsholing , Bhutan . The drive from Phuntsholing to Thimpu took about eight hours. I got myself a permit to enter Bhutan and then a taxi. I was sharing the taxi – which like most other taxis was an Indian Maruti Suzuki – with three other people. One of the passengers was a very cheerful Bhutanese woman who had bought two huge sacks full of mostly children’s clothes to sell in the market in the town. She sang along to the Bhutanese music tapes the driver would occasionally put on. In spite of minor accidents and a few hour-long hold-ups in places where the precarious roads were being patched and repaired, she never lost her good cheer. The other two passengers were Indian workers from Cooch Behar , West Bengal , who spoke to each other in a Bengali dialect and to the woman in Nepali. They had been hired by a Bhutanese builder to work as manual labour in Thimpu. Every few hours we would cross a district boundary where the non-Bhutanese had to trudge out and show their travel permits, which were duly stamped. The drive was, by turns, exhilarating and nauseating, as only Himalayan roads can be. There was a degree of familiarity in the journey with the same slogans as are visible all over the northern Indian states; the roads are, after all, built by India ’s Border Roads Organisation. Bhutan license-plated Tata trucks belched out black choking smoke. Arrival in Thimpu at night was like entering into a collection of pinpoints of light until suddenly we came to the main street with lots of hotels, both cheap and expensive. The next morning I realise that Thimpu is beautifully situated, surrounded by a ring of hills like a flower, with the snow-capped mountains forming the outer corolla. The hillsides are dotted by clumps of pine poles with Buddhist prayer flags; these are not small triangular pennants, but are large, square-shaped and mounted on long pine poles. As they whip in the wind, the hills feel as if they are trembling. All buildings in Thimpu, and elsewhere in Bhutan , by law must follow the traditional construction: white plastered stone walls, painted wooden windows and doors, overhanging roofs and beautifully decorated outside eaves. In the taller, more modern buildings, cement is used and the traditional style is more a decorative element, but older buildings are visible everywhere. This style imposition makes the rural villages and smaller towns look a lot better than similar locations in India ’s Himachal Pradesh or Uttaranchal. In Thimpu this uniformity of design does not seem forced but gives the town a pleasant unity, at least compared to Indian small towns which seem to give an impression of things being left incomplete, as if the buildings and the towns themselves were promises -- financial and aesthetic -- that were never fulfilled. The attractiveness of the town is emphasised by the clothes the local people wear. Men wear the gho, a long robe folded and tied around the waist, while women wear a similar ankle-length version called the kira. Schoolchildren wear these garments in their uniform colours. They are made from beautiful fabrics, which in the gho, reminded me of Scottish kilts. Such traditional clothes have to be worn by law, and the police do have the right to stop and fine people dressed otherwise. Younger people when out of school, however, do flaunt western clothes and in their case the police are usually understandingly lax. Thimpu has a Wild West frontier feel to it, possibly because of a number of hardware shops and bars on its main streets and the pick-up trucks parked outside these. The frontier feel is heightened by the weekend market held in a corner of the town. The market is an exchange point for villagers from surrounding villages, who travel miles from nearby villages to buy their weekly supplies of fruits, vegetables, fern tips, cheese wrapped in banana leaves, spices, and chillies and chilli powder, both vital ingredients of Bhutanese food. There was dried fish being sold and I was surprised to see dried Bombay duck which had possibly taken the same route as I had to get here. A few stalls also sold religious goods; a man tried to sell me a human skull used as a bowl in religious ceremonies. Shops surrounding the market sell clothes and shoes, and luggage and the cheaper portable type of electronic goods, mostly imported from Thailand or India . Many Chinese products are also available, brought in from the officially closed old trade routes to Tibet . Thimpu is the largest town in this country, yet feels quite small by Indian standards and the tourist attraction of the town itself would probably pale in a day or two. I am in Thimpu to learn about Gross National Happiness (GNH). GNH is Bhutan ’s reaction to the international tyranny of the Gross National Product, the conventional monetary method of measuring the worth of a country and its people. GNH is this country’s peculiar method of steering its development in the right direction. In Bhutan GNH is not a slogan coined by a vote-seeking politician running out of ideas, but a real constructive ideology adopted by all the Bhutanese government ministries. It informs government institutions ranging from forestry policy to the planning commission. The term Gross National Happiness (GNH) was coined by Bhutan 's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck when he ascended the throne in 1972. His much-quoted saying that GNH was more important than GNP was a dramatic way of pointing out that financial balance sheets and statistics did not give a true picture of the well-being of the people of a country. This idea has been made a cornerstone of development here. Bhutan is a small mountainous country of about 40,000 square km, about the size of Switzerland ; a pearl sandwiched between India and China , relatively gigantic countries both in geographical size as well as population. The world’s only tantric Buddhist kingdom seems to be doing well on most levels, possibly unusually well for a country in South Asia . In the past decade, the kingdom’s economy has grown at an annual rate of nearly 7%, matched by few least-developed countries, while the population growth is less than 3%. Life expectancy has jumped dramatically from 35 to 66 years. But Bhutan is still poor and is ranked a ‘least developed country’, along with places like Haiti and Bangladesh . Much of the strife of this region has passed Bhutan by. A nearby neighbour, Nepal , has taken the retrograde step of turning itself from a democracy into an absolute monarchy. Meanwhile, Bhutan ’s king’s confidence in his policies and his people is evident in the wave of democratic reforms starting in 1998 when he first gave the National Assembly, an elected body, the authority to remove him with a two-thirds vote. He continues to devolve power to his people and has released a draft constitution and will soon have a referendum to debate the issues brought forth by it. The progressive nature of his government, coupled with the rapid but seemingly unproblematic way in which development has proceeded here, has given the otherwise utopian GNH a down-to-earth quality that has attracted attention. In recent times, GNH has been mentioned often in newspapers and journals and last year a conference was organised to discuss operationalising it. Yet from reading the conference papers it is immediately obvious that apart from some historical analysis there is very little substance to them. Most are written by western academics and development ‘experts’. At worst, the papers demonstrate a wilful blindness towards the ground realities of development, and at best, they have a romantic and patronising attitude towards an underdeveloped country struggling to balance the threat of globalisation with the need to reduce poverty. They all seem bolstered by references to the new-age pseudo-science writers and anti-globalisation conspiracy theorists. The Buddhist basis of Bhutanese society and hence Gross National Happiness is also a central theme, but rarely with an understanding that Buddhism is a broad school and that there are various types of Buddhism with major doctrinal differences, and like all religions it has its contradictions. How is it that the Bhutanese eat meat nearly three times a day when the Buddhist scriptures forbid killing? There is also the obligatory reference to Shangri La, and the decadent and corrupt western consumerist society, seen in things like drug use and high divorce rates. Yet there’s rarely a mention of the fact that practically every second doorway in Thimpu is a bar, and people drinking at 7:30am is not remarkable. There are also obvious ‘orientalisms’, like references to the ‘distant’ country of Bhutan, which it obviously isn’t to the poor migrant workers of Cooch Behar. Much is made of the fact that there are no McDonalds or traffic lights here. Yet, one immediately notices the well-advertised presence of Pepsi, Coke, Reebok and the activist’s much-hated Nestle. High-powered four-wheel drive cars are everywhere. Safe in the cocoons of their developed world, it’s easier for these writers to tolerate and support in other countries what they would not tolerate in their own. For example, if you look at some of Bhutan ’s official policies another way, you could see a country that forces its citizens to speak a particular language, wear a particular costume, live in specified houses. You could see a country where there is no separation between state and church, no secular government, and citizenship based on ethnic origin. A country where multiculturalism is officially frowned upon. And where the monarchy is active and certainly not a figurehead. Television has been allowed in relatively recently and some channels are banned. Of course, it may be argued that cities and countries with the tightest controls over their citizens— including those that Indian politicians see as models, Shanghai and Singapore — are the most rapidly progressing ones in the material sense, where the middle and upper classes are the most comfortable, happiest. But is the bargain worthwhile? It may be worthwhile to remember that happiness is not a new and quirky idea. The American constitution guarantees its people the pursuit of happiness and in fact early statements of the philosophy of utilitarianism, perhaps the most cold and calculating of all political philosophies, was based on the idea of providing the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Modern economics seems to prefer the word ‘welfare’, which is perhaps an embarrassed euphemism for happiness. So is GNH actually a viable alternative to economic indices and growth measurements? Studying the route Bhutan has taken is a useful exercise in that it serves to illustrate the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the development ‘game’. Why should a country be labelled ‘least developed’? How is development to be measured? Is a higher position on the development scale a measure of success of governments’ polices? Who are they competing with anyway and why? Who is a poor person? The important thing about GNH is that it provides a vision which is distinct from growth, money, and purely materialistic measures of how well a country is doing. This vision can serve as a nucleus for ideas of an alternative to free market capitalism; perhaps it also gives a solid form to sustainable development. If Bhutan is any indication, it also suggests ways in which a country can open itself out to the outside world, materially and intellectually, without losing its identity. In between my meetings with people about the practicalities of GNH, I walk around Thimpu admiring the buildings. It is amazing how much architectural variation is possible within the prescribed Bhutanese style for all houses and office buildings. As I look at one house, which unusually has a second floor balcony, two young girls come out on to it, one of whom is combing her hair and singing loudly and guilelessly. The song is Britney Spears’ Not Yet a Woman. The second girl starts dancing, mimicking movements from the video. InfoChange News & Features, April 2005
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