User talk:Bhutan krishna

Krishna chhetri Date 10/06/2012

Gross National Happiness In Bhutan

In 1972, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, King of the isolated Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, grappling with the complexities of his nation’s entrance into the modern world, introduced the concept of Gross National Happiness. For, according to the king: “Bhutan seeks to establish a happy society, where people are safe, where everyone is guaranteed a decent livelihood, and where people enjoy universal access to good education and health Care. It is a society where there is no pollution and violation of the environment, where there is no aggression and war, where inequalities do not exist, and where cultural values get strengthened every day. . . A happy society is one where people enjoy freedoms, where there is no oppression, where art, music, dance, drama and culture flourish.” (Wangchuck).

The king also remarked that he cared more about the Gross National Happiness, or GNH, than he cared about the Gross National Product. This may seem like a simple statement of the obvious: economic growth alone does not bring contentment. The promoters of GNH maintain that this brilliant policy development tool will provide the people with all the basic amenities and lift them from poverty and backwardness. GNH detractors, however, say that not only is the very measurement of human happiness in the aggregate fraught with numerous problems but that GNH is an elitist concept embraced by fundamentalist environmentalists, left wing liberals, and economists with Marxist leanings. In the opinion of this writer, the truth is self-evidently on the side of GNH detractors. The Centre for Bhutan Studies (CBS) has identified nine GNH indicators that were used in a pilot survey to measure GNH in Bhutan. They are as follows: 1)	Standard of living 2)	Health of the population 3)	Education 4)	Ecosystem vitality and diversity 5)	Cultural vitality and diversity 6)	Time use and balance 7)	Good governance 8)	Community vitality 9)	Emotional well-being According to the results of this survey, 68% of the Bhutanese indicated that they were “extremely happy” with their lives. Yet it must be noted that the majority of the approximately 900,000 Bhutanese people lives in grinding poverty (the UN ranks Bhutan 134th out of 177 countries) and have overall health, life spans, and educations equivalent to those in neighboring countries.  Perhaps the king’s subjects are not entirely free to speak their minds freely. The first pillar of GNH, “standard of living,” has been recently been modified to “economic self-reliance.”  This is revealing because 80% of the population are subsistence farmers.  Bhutan’s total exports are just US120 m, half of which is derived from electricity generated by rivers and sold to India.  72% percent of the land is mountainous forest, which would by all objective measures cause a low “ecosystem diversity” rating. Road-building remains a top priority for the government, yet even the main “highway” between the cities of Thimphu and Paro is in most places wide enough for just one car, and many villages can be reached only on foot. The living standard in Bhutan is no better than it is in neighboring countries. Jobs are few, according to former refugee-now economist Anup Chettri: “ The living standard of Bhutanese people is very low in the villages as well as the cities. Jobs are scarce. Many graduates are frustrated at their inability to find meaningful work, so they leave Bhutan to find better jobs in other countries.” (Chettri) Health facilities are also hard to find in much of the country. Many people have to walk more than six hours to reach to the nearest health center. Due to the primitive transportation conditions it is very difficult to find doctors to serve in the remote areas. The government enjoys touting its free health facilities but people have to travel a long way to get to them and wait a long time to get better care from the hospital. Education in Bhutan is not horrible as compared with other developing countries, but this is due largely to the fact that most of the teachers in the cities are imported from India. Many village areas are without a single school; the majority of the children are uneducated. They are compelled to work on the farms to help their parents, and the government doesn’t encourage parents to send their children away to school. Only if ignorance is bliss can gross national happiness apply to the uneducated majority. With this Everest if irrefutable evidence, the results of the initial survey on the Bhutanese people’s GNH can be chalked up to a simple reluctance to tell the truth, as is the case in most totalitarian regimes. Perhaps the greatest and cruelest self-deception contained in the planks of GNH is the notion of “Cultural Vitality and Diversity.” Although Bhutan is hailed by some as ‘the last Shangri-La’ it has generated one of the highest numbers of refugees in the world in proportion to its population. Since 1991 over one sixth of Bhutan’s people have sought asylum in Nepal, India and other countries around the world. The vast majority of the refugees are Lhotshampas, one of Bhutan’s three main ethnic groups, who were forced to leave Bhutan in the early 1990s. There is ample evidence, as documented by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, that the expulsion of large numbers of Lhotshampas was planned and executed with meticulous attention to detail. Over 105,000 Bhutanese have spent more than 15 years living in refugee camps established in Nepal by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Thousands more are living outside the camps in Nepal and India, and some in North America, Europe and Australia. Since 2008 a resettlement process has seen many thousands of Bhutanese refugees from the camps in Nepal being re-settled primarily in the USA. And I, Krishna Bista, am one of them. So it is with some authority that I am able to address this issue. On the video-sharing website YouTube is a video of the prime minister sermonizing about gross national happiness at Oxford university. One of the Immigrant Refugees asks him: “How can you talk about gross national happiness when you’ve evicted more than one hundred thousand people from the country? Is that gross national happiness?” Another question: “How does gross national happiness square with the massive discrimination between the Nepali and the Drukpas?” The prime minister fumbles with a non-answer: “Those who left were illegal immigrants to Bhutan from India and Nepal. They came to work but they overstayed in Bhutan. So we asked them to go to their own country.” Asked? Ha! I was there. It was forced eviction. The GNH of the Bhutanese population cannot be de-linked from the misery it has caused so many, for the Bhutanese government is in deep denial when it attempts to provide any objective measure of human happiness. GNH remains an intellectual concept with little real-world application. For instance: •	In Bhutan there is a high level of acceptance of domestic violence: 70% of women believe they deserve to be beaten in they refuse to have sex with their husbands, argue with them or burned their dinner. •	Alcohol abuse is emerging as a major public-health problem in the country, with more than half of all alcohol drinkers in Bhutan falling into the criteria for hazardous drinking. •	Rates of drug use are disturbingly high among college-age people. Yet in an effort to safeguard its heritage, Bhutan touts its protection of weaving and costume-making by making a traditional dress compulsory in public places. It is this outfit that bedecks the prime minister, along with his orange ministerial shawl, as he presides over his cabinet located in a 17th century fortress that serves as both monastery and government office. It comes as no surprise that Bhutan does not have exclusive rights to national hubris. The fallacies of GNH have now been adopted by a handful of other nations, including UK, France and Japan. The literature on GNH is not as innocuous as some would like to believe, for it drips with the language of statism. And why not? Most of the economists who are now writing about GNH have strong leftist sentiments. GNH has now become a cause dejour that is discussed in academic hallways and high-end political conferences held in swanky resorts by people who enjoy lifestyles far superior to the common peasants whose lives may soon be deeply affected by decisions made far remote from their circumstances. Yet putting aside the enormous hypocrisy inherent Bhutan’s GNH concepts, perhaps the most disturbing element of the larger GNH movement is that it paints with broad brushstrokes the West as being comprised of people who are miserable, mean-spirited, depressed and anxious. Any objective observer can see that nothing could be further from the truth. It appears that GNH is not being taught as one economic model among many, but as the only rational and acceptable model. It has become indoctrination, antithetical to democracy, freedom and capitalism. “The chairman of the GNH commission is more focused on delivering a lecture to Westerners rather than making sincere efforts to planned development in the countryside of interior Bhutan,” says Bhutanese refugee leader Tek Nath Rizal. R.C. Khanal, a teacher in Bhutan for more than ten years who also spent nearly twenty years in refugee camps in Nepal, believes that people cannot be truly free in a monarchical system. “There is still religious and caste discrimination in Bhutan. Everyone is forced to wear national dress. GNH is a way for the government to get support from donor agencies.” As measures of GNH depend on a series of subjective judgments about well-being, governments may well be able to define GNH ways that suit their interests. Economics professor Deirdre McCloskey criticizes such measurements as unscientific. “Recording the percentage of people who say they are happy will tell you how people use words,” she says, making the analogy that society could not “base physics on asking people whether today was ‘hot, nice, or cold’.” McCloskey also criticizes the anti-consumerism of the GNH movement, asserting that “High culture has in fact always flourished in eras of lively commerce, from fifth-century Greece through Song China and Renaissance Italy down to the Dutch Golden Age.” Professor Deirdre McCloskey tells the truth about GNH. GNH is at best a cotton-candy economic paradigm whose adherents chide the West for all the wrong turns it has taken while in fact they themselves are decades away from even coming close to the same levels of economic and social development. At the same time they want to compete with the West for the side effects of this development. At its worst GNH is this: a hollow, dreadful and callous concept, based on racist nationalism, propaganda and state control of the economy, ultimately destined for the same scrap-heap of failed human endeavors as the ideology which inspires it, Nazism. Yet how many more lives will it ruin before its course is run?

Sources:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness