In his on-foot tour, King Khesar visited the flood affected people and talked to them about the problem, besides inspecting the damages flood caused to physical infrastructure. 

He walked from Umling (Lalai) to Manas area in Gelephu, looking the situation of the Mochu, Taklai, Lankhar, and other rivers, and villages in between them. These are the areas where resettlement took place in 1997 and 98 and rarely any Nepali-speaking people live. He avoided Chhuzagang (Danabari) where large Nepali population lives.

He then moved through Panbang through Drangmey and to see Tungkudemba, Gerong, Rebati and other villages, camped along the Darangchu for a night before heading to Shilangtoe village where he talked with students as well.

While returning to Thimphu, he visited the Sunkosh township in Dagana and flood-affected people in Wangduephodrang and Punakha.

Under a new Constitution, government programs must be judged by the happiness they produce, not by the economic benefits. Seth Mydans/International Herald Tribune

“Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.”

The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications.

“You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in,” he said, referring to the global economic crisis. “Industrialized societies have decided now that G.N.P. is a broken promise.”

Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs — from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade — must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce.

The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of gross national happiness.”

The Bhutanese have started with an experiment within an experiment, accepting the resignation of the popular king as an absolute monarch and holding the country’s first democratic election a year ago.

The change is part of attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji said. “They resonate well, democracy and G.N.H. Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual.”

It was a rare case of a monarch’s unilaterally stepping back from power, and an even rarer case of his doing so against the wishes of his subjects. He gave the throne to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of constitutional monarch without executive power.

Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy place to nimbly rewrite economic rules — a country with one airport and two commercial planes, where the east can only be reached from the west after four days’ travel on mountain roads.

Prayer flags above a monastery in the kingdom of 700,000. Seth Mydans/International Herald Tribune

No more than 700,000 people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, and its task now is to control and manage the inevitable changes to its way of life. It is a country where cigarettes are banned and television was introduced just 10 years ago, where traditional clothing and architecture are enforced by law and where the capital city has no stoplight and just one traffic officer on duty.

If the world is to take gross national happiness seriously, the Bhutanese concede, they must work out a scheme of definitions and standards that can be quantified and measured by the big players of the world’s economy.

“Once Bhutan said, ‘O.K., here we are with G.N.H.,’ the developed world and the World Bank and the I.M.F. and so on asked, ‘How do you measure it?’ ” Mr. Dorji said, characterizing the reactions of the world’s big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains and the 72 indicators of happiness.

Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.

All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.

“We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on,” Mr. Dorji said.

Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following: “One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”

This is followed by a set of equations:

= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)

= 1-.281875

= .718

Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy.

Gross national happiness has a broader application for Bhutan as it races to preserve its identity and culture from the encroachments of the outside world.

“How does a small country like Bhutan handle globalization?” Mr. Dorji asked. “We will survive by being distinct, by being different.”

Bhutan is pitting its four pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators against the 48 channels of Hollywood and Bollywood that have invaded since television was permitted a decade ago.

“Before June 1999 if you asked any young person who is your hero, the inevitable response was, ‘The king,’ ” Mr. Dorji said. “Immediately after that it was David Beckham, and now it’s 50 Cent, the rap artist. Parents are helpless.”

So if G.N.H. may hold the secret of happiness for people suffering from the collapse of financial institutions abroad, it offers something more urgent here in this pristine culture.

“Bhutan’s story today is, in one word, survival,” Mr. Dorji said. “Gross national happiness is survival; how to counter a threat to survival.”

Source: The New York Times

Published: May 6, 2009

On Wednesday and Thursday, he visited some of the remotest villages like Serphu, Gangla, Kheauma and Pangkhar, located at two-day walking distance from district headquarters, of Khoma Geog in Lhuentse. The villages are not linked to any electricity and communication facilities.  

King reached homes to talk to people besides interacting with those lined up to welcome him. 

King visited Gangla and Pangkhar Communtity Primary Schools of the geog where he advised students to study hard to support their family and serve the country and praised teachers for their work to educate the students. 

He met 69 needy students and 19 class toppers from various schools in the district on Friday and granted education allowance to them. During his meeting with 37 poor and old people of the district, King assured to grant a monthly stipend.  

In Phaling and Gorgan, he granted land and timber kidu to three dozen shopkeepers.

The king has been traveling to the district to keep up his words to provide kidu to those landless as promised in National Assembly. 

The National Land Commission has begun resurvey in the country to find out the landless people. Begun in June 2008, the commission has now completed survey in Lhuentse and parts of Mongar.

King Khesar’s rule begins with heralds of democratic system in the country with optimism that voices suppressed for years would be addressed in newer circumstances.

Eldest son Jigme Singye Wangchuck form third wife Queen Tshering Yangdon, unmarried King Khesar has a younger sister, Princess Dechen Yangzom, and brother, Prince Jigme Dorji, as well as four half-sisters and three half-brothers.

He completed his basic education in Bhutan and Kalimpong in India, the king studied at Phillips Academy (Andover), Cushing Academy and Wheaton College in Massachusetts, United States, before graduating from Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK. He completed MPhil on Foreign Service Program and Politics from Oxford.

The king as head of the state has participated in two parliamentary debates where electoral laws, land reform and other important issues including census categorization in southern Bhutan were deliberated. In his speeches as king, he has stressed that the new generation for Bhutanese was to ensure the success of democracy and maintaining peace prosperity in the country. However, he hasn’t spoken anything about the situation in eastern and southern districts created during his father’s rule.

King receives kiss from a girl

Signing a new treaty with India in February 2007 replacing the treaty of 1949, the latter providing greater liberty to Bhutan on its foreign policy is his notable achievement.

From this year, the government has announced three-day national holidays for his birthday celebration, cutting down the holidays for his father’s birthday.

When he celebrates his second birthday as king of Bhutan, it is very short to predict how kingly would his rule be but failing to meet the aspirations and expectations from the people will obviously tarnish his image to be worse than his father. Wishing him for better life and better kingship: hope Bhutan will see justice in his time.

Addressing the third convocation of the university for Samtse and Paro Colleges of Education on Tuesday said in all the countries where progress has been strong in the areas Bhutan strive to develop, the strength of the education system has been in Math and Science. 

“In fact in India, the favorite subject for most students is Mathematics. In Bhutan, Mathematics is one of our main weaknesses– most students do not like Math and the majority score less than 50 percent. We have similar weaknesses in Science and amazingly, even English,” he said.

“We have done our work well, our policies have been good – everything we have done we have done with the interests of our people and country in mind– that is why we are here today as a unique and successful nation. But my saying these things will not change anything,” he added.

Stating that he worries every single day about people and country, King Khesar said, “And to voice these worries frankly so that we do not get carried away, get caught unawares, or become complacent. So bear with me as I speak to you about my concerns about our education system or standards.”

Hinting at the political changes in the country, he said, “We must understand that the times have changed here in Bhutan and all around us in the world. We cannot face new challenges with the same tools. The private sector is adjusting itself to new challenges and opportunities; the bureaucracy is finding its place in a new system of governance; the entire country is adapting to new roles in our young democracy.”

He underlined the need for building an education system that nurtures people with the right skills, knowledge and training to fulfill the vision of Bhutan – sooner the better.

“We can dream of a strong bureaucracy of the highest standards but we must not forget that those standards must be set in school where our future bureaucrats are,” he said.

Royal University of Bhutan

King further said to dream of world class IT parks, of being an international financial centre, of competing at international standards it needs talents and skills bestowed from schools and colleges, adding that strong education system is required for dreaming a nation of environmental conservation, GNH, a strong economy and a vibrant democracy.

Developing hydropower, mines, health, tourism, banking, Information Technology; roads, domestic and international airports were some of the areas pointed out by King Khesar which needed development during tenth plan. 

He questioned if the Bhutanese education system reflects the country’s changing opportunities and challenges.