Smartphones, TVs hurting Buddhist culture in Bhutan

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THIMPHU, Bhutan -- Kencho Tshering, a red-robed Buddhist monk, takes a call from the King of Bhutan's office, then duly dashes off to start a ceremony praying for a break in the monsoon rains.

<< Bhutan - nestled in the Himalayas and flanked by both India and China - is renowned for its rich Buddhist culture, and villages are still steeped in its traditions. However, Buddhist devotion has waned since Bhutan allowed television in 1999

But while he may be on speed dial for royal requests, the clout of his fellow monks is on the wane in the remote kingdom as it absorbs the impact of technology and democracy as well as an abuse scandal.

 "Bhutan is changing. The monastic body is going down and down," Tshering told AFP at Dechen Phodrang, the monks' school where he is principal, which is perched with majestic views over the capital Thimphu.

"Even for senior monks, there's no respect in the city," he sighed.

Bhutan -- nestled in the Himalayas and flanked by both India and China -- is renowned for its rich Buddhist culture, and villages are still steeped in its traditions.

Fluttering prayer flags are a common sight, as are giant flying phalluses painted on walls to ward off evil -- a symbol of a national saint, the "Divine Madman", who is believed to have subjugated demonesses with his penis in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Protecting the Buddhist culture is a key pillar of Bhutan's unique "Gross National Happiness" development model, which aims to balance spiritual and mental well-being with economic growth.

Yet Tshering, who spent three years, three months and three days in silent meditation, believes Buddhist devotion has waned since Bhutan allowed television in 1999 -- the world's last country to do so.

"People are less god-fearing, less superstitious... The number of rituals they do has gone down," agreed Karma Phuntsho, author of "The History of Bhutan" and a former monk.

Phuntsho said the Bhutanese worldview has changed dramatically since secular education was widely introduced in the 1960s, weakening the dominance of monastic schools that for centuries were a powerful force.

Bhutan was unified in the 17th century by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and the old 'dzong' fortresses, part-monastery and part-government offices, are a reminder of the previous intertwining of religion and politics.

The decline in monastics' clout was clear with the onset of democracy five years ago. Bhutan's monks, nuns and a large community of lay priests are now barred from the process to ensure religion and politics are kept apart.

"They don't have a say at all, they don't have a franchise to vote. So political authority has really waned," said Phuntsho.

 In terms of spiritual influence, some say monastic materialism is partly to blame for a decline.

Although usually associated with a spartan existence, Bhutan's strand of Buddhism allows monks to own a range of possessions -- "there are even monks with big cars," said Damber K. Nirola, a psychiatrist in Thimphu.

But the monasteries still play a vital social role, providing homes to thousands of children whose parents may have died or feel unable to support them.

At Dechen Phodrang, young monks can be found busy learning the national 'dzongkha' script, making colourful cakes to offer the deities, or blowing the sound of the long 'dungchen' Buddhist trumpet over the valley.

With a government allowance per boy of less than a dollar a day, Tshering says it is a struggle to look after their 260 students, aged as young as six, who sleep in rows on classroom floors.

While just over 7,000 monks are registered with the central monastic body, on the ground about 9,000 to 11,000 exist at any one time, according to Karma Penjor, secretary at the Commission for the Monastic Affairs of Bhutan.

"They can't say no when people come with their children," he told AFP, saying the monasteries look after and educate "Bhutan's poorest of the poor".

They are also not without controversy.

A recent report by The Raven, a Bhutanese magazine, told the story of two young boys who said they escaped their monastery after being sexually abused by two of the older monks, who are supposed to be celibate.

The National Commission for Women and Children confirmed to AFP that the case had been dealt with internally by the monastic body, and one of the accused had been disrobed.

Between young monks, non-penetrative "thigh sex" is also "common", according to a UNICEF-supported report in 2012 on vulnerable Bhutanese adolescents.

Psychiatrist Nirola, a former district medical officer, said he found sexually transmitted diseases were quite regular among monks and possibly from heterosexual liaisons outside the monasteries.

He also came across youngsters suffering stress from the highly disciplined lifestyle, which was often not one of their own choice.

"They want to go to town, play on smartphones. That creates a lot of problems in their mind."

In May, the monastic commission opened a child protection office for the welfare of young monks and to raise awareness about their rights, but Penjor said better backing was crucial to its success.

"It's one thing to keep having awareness workshops, but if support for infrastructure is not there, after a while rights keep falling off, it's not very effective."

Some monks have embraced Bhutan's modernisation in a bid to get more support.

The Phajoding monastery, which is a three-hour uphill hike from the nearest road, is using social media to spread its news and raise funds, with regular updates on Twitter and Facebook.

Phuntsho thinks it will take more than PR to get Bhutan's monastic body on the rise again, and a key to that is modernising its education system.

"It's a big challenge for the monastics. I can see a very urgent need for them to reform and develop, but it's very unfair to expect that of them when they don't have the resources."

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Bhutan Makes Condoms Available To Buddhist Monks To Stop Spread Of STDs

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Timphu, Bhutan -- Health officials in the tiny Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan are making condoms available at all monastic schools in a bid to stem the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV among young monks who are supposed to be celibate.

"We are making condoms freely available everywhere, even in monastic schools and colleges," Bhutan's minister of health, Zangley Drukpa, said in a phone interview. The ministry, he added, has formed a special action group to deal with STDs in monasteries.

Warning signs of risky behavior among monks first appeared in 2009, when a report on risks and vulnerabilities of adolescents revealed that monks were engaging in "thigh sex" (in which a man uses another man's clenched thighs for intercourse), according to the state-owned Kuensel daily.

The health ministry got concerned when a dozen monks -- including a 12-year-old -- were diagnosed with sexual transmitted diseases a year later, Kuensel reports. At least five monks are known to be HIV-positive, the youngest being 19.

The 2012 report of the U.N. agency focused on AIDS response and progress also noted cases of HIV among Bhutan's monks.

Bhutan's Commission for the Monastic Affairs says stricter discipline is a solution. While corporal punishment is banned, monks told Kuensel it is still practiced.

"It is believed the cane, the whip and the rosary represent the Bodhisattvas who personify wisdom, compassion and power, which are needed to discipline," the commission's health and religion coordinator, Tashi Galey, told the newspaper.

Psychiatrists suggest the spread of disease could be a result of mental stress. It is not uncommon for monks and nuns, mostly between the ages of 15 and 25, to visit psychiatrists. Even senior monks show symptoms of severe stress, especially when they are undergoing long periods of meditation, Dr. Damber Kumar Nirola told Kuensel.

"About 70 to 80 percent of (senior) monks are obese, hypertensive and also suffer from back ache because of their sitting posture and sedentary lifestyle," urologist Lotay Tshering told the paper.

Geography also plays a role. Most hilltop monastic schools lack recreational facilities. "Getting space for playgrounds is difficult, but we provide volley balls and badminton rackets," the commission's secretary, Karma Penjor, told Kuensel.

Bhutan, a landlocked nation of about 700,000 people sandwiched between India and China, is the world's only officially Buddhist country, and has about 388 monastic schools with 7,240 monks and 5,149 nuns.

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Bhutan aims to be first 100% organic nation

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Timphu, Bhutan -- The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, famed for seeking "happiness" for its citizens, is aiming to become the first nation in the world to turn its home-grown food and farmers 100-percent organic.

The tiny Buddhist-majority nation wedged between China and India has an unusual and some say enviable approach to economic development, centred on protecting the environment and focusing on mental well-being.

Its development model measuring "Gross National Happiness" instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been discussed at the United Nations and has been publicly backed by leaders from Britain and France, among others.

It banned television until 1999, keeps out mass tourism to shield its culture from foreign influence, and most recently set up a weekly "pedestrians' day" on Tuesdays that sees cars banned from town centres.

Its determination to chart a different path can be seen in its new policy to phase out artificial chemicals in farming in the next 10 years, making its staple foods of wheat and potatoes, as well as its fruits, 100 percent organic.

"Bhutan has decided to go for a green economy in light of the tremendous pressure we are exerting on the planet," Agriculture Minister Pema Gyamtsho told AFP in an interview by telephone from the capital Thimphu.

"If you go for very intensive agriculture it would imply the use of so many chemicals, which is not in keeping with our belief in Buddhism, which calls for us to live in harmony with nature."

Bhutan has a population of just over 700,000, two-thirds of whom depend on farming in villages dotted around fertile southern plains and the soaring Himalayan peaks and deep valleys to the north.

Overwhelmingly forested, no more than three percent of the country's land area is used for growing crops, says Gyamtsho, with the majority of farmers already organic and reliant on rotting leaves or compost as natural fertilisers.

"Only farmers in areas that are accessible by roads or have easy transport have access to chemicals," he explained, saying chemical use was already "very low" by international standards.

In the large valleys, such as the one cradling the sleepy capital, chemicals are used to kill a local weed that is difficult to take out by hand -- a challenge compounded by a lack of farm labour.

Elsewhere, the fertiliser urea is sometimes added to soil, while a fungicide to control leaf rust on wheat is also available.

"We have developed a strategy that is step-by-step. We cannot go organic overnight," Gyamtsho said, describing a policy and roadmap which were formally adopted by the government last year.

"We have identified crops for which we can go organic immediately and certain crops for which we will have to phase out the use of chemicals, for rice in certain valleys for example."

Bhutan's only competitor for the first "100-percent organic" title is the tiny self-governing island of Niue in the South Pacific, which has a population of only 1,300. It aims to reach its objective by 2015-2020.

Nadia Scialabba, a global specialist on organic farming at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, says the organic food market and its premium prices are attractive for small countries and territories.

"This is happening in very small countries who are not competitive on quantity, but they would like to be competitive in quality," she told AFP.

The global organics market was estimated to be worth 44.5 billion euros ($57 billion) in 2010, according to figures from the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.

Bhutan sends rare mushrooms to Japan, vegetables to upmarket hotels in Thailand, its highly prized apples to India and elsewhere, as well as red rice to the United States.

By shunning fertilisers and other chemicals, the country also stands to gain by reducing its import bill -- a particular concern for a country short on foreign currency.

Peter Melchett, policy director at Britain's organic Soil Association, says the main benefit of becoming 100-percent organic is an assurance of quality to consumers.

"Because there won't be pesticides or other chemicals on sale in the kingdom, they would be able to offer a high level of guarantees that products are organic," Melchett explained.

In countries like Spain, for example, there is a problem of contamination when organic farms are next to highly industrialised producers using large quantities of artificial chemicals, Melchett said.

"It's difficult for organic farmers in those circumstances to keep their crops and supply-chain free of contamination."

Bhutan's organic policy would "start to give the country a reputation of high-quality organic food, which in the long-run would give them a market advantage and the possibility of price premiums," he added.

Jurmi Dorji, a member of the 103-strong Daga Shingdrey Pshogpa farmers' association in southern Bhutan, says his fellow members are in favour of the policy.

"More than a decade ago, people realised that the chemicals were not good for farming," he told AFP. "I cannot say everyone has stopped using chemicals but almost 90 percent have."

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Bhutan counts the cost of trying to buy happiness

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THIMPHU, Bhutan -- They say you can't buy happiness - and it's something Bhutan is finding out the hard way.

The tiny, mostly-Buddhist Himalayan kingdom won a world voice for adopting a happiness index to measure its economy. But its prime minister says it promptly forgot its own lesson, and let a sudden rush of prosperity go to its head.

"Wealth creates increased desire," Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley told Reuters in an interview in the capital Thimphu, surrounded by tree covered mountains dotted with prayer flags.

"There are families with four or five cars. There are luxury vehicles being imported that can hardly drive on our roads and are made for far better roads than we have here."

A country that was closed to foreigners until 1974 and only recently opened up to the forces of globalisation lacked the tools to cope with new-found economic growth and the wealth it brought.

Debt-fuelled consumerism that far outpaced economic output has now led, inevitably, to a rude awakening.

The government has cut expenditure and is considering raising taxes on imported vehicles. The central bank, the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan, has rationed the main trading currency, the Indian rupee, squeezing private businesses.

Youth unemployment is over 9 percent and people are drifting away from the countryside, and traditional values, to the towns.

Worst of all, Bhutan's most recent Gross National Happiness GNH.L index, in 2010, found only 41 percent qualified as "happy".

BECOMING MORE MATERIALIST

"We have been moving away from GNH values and, like many countries, becoming more materialist," said Thinley.

"When such tendencies come at a cost to the economy, like we are suffering now, the government has to take difficult measures," he said. "We have to accept that the rupee is not our currency."

Thinley's Druk Phuensum Tshogpa government won power in Bhutan's first democratic election in 2008 and heads to the polls again next year.

He said the crisis highlighted the need to focus once more on the happiness index, which uses nine criteria: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, use of time, community vitality and good governance.

"Our economic problems are the result of being opened to the world and being part of the globalisation process."

Despite its boom, Bhutan remains one of the world's least developed and poorest nations, where 70 percent of 700,000 people live on subsistence farming. But economic growth led to a surge in imports of industrial and consumer goods from neighbouring India.

Almost one in eight of the 65,000 vehicles on its roads were imported last year.

Thinley said the cost of importing fuel to keep these cars on the roads wiped out the earnings that Bhutan made from its major industry, selling hydro-electric power to India.

"The revenue we earn from exporting clean energy is the same as the cost for the dirty fuel that we import from India," he said, sipping Bhutan's traditional butter-and-salt tea in a timber-clad room dominated by portraits of Bhutan's five kings.

HAPPINESS OR DEVELOPMENT?

But it seems to be getting harder to convince people to put a holistic sense of happiness ahead of raw economic development.

In parliament on Thursday the government forecast economic growth of 7-8 percent next year and said it hoped to reach its target of cutting poverty to 15 percent from 23 percent. The electricity grid covers 77 percent of the country.

"It's sad but true that the roads we are building to take services to villages are the roads by which villagers leave and some set up shanty towns around the cities," said Thinley, dressed in Bhutan's traditional knee-length, belted robe.

He said the government must prioritise policies that promoted the appreciation of rural life and stop the drift into urban areas, which was decimating villages and making the country more dependent on imported produce.

"In many ways, life in the rural setting is better and the possibility to find happiness is far greater than living in a city where you don't even know your next-door-neighbour and violence is rising," he said.

"We need to create a conscious desire in our people to continue to live in rural areas or move back from urban areas. Rather than live in a stuffy apartment, go back to the farm!"

It may be a hard message to sell to the young people heading for the towns, abandoning traditional dress for jeans, and looking for civil service jobs rather than manual work.

"People across Bhutan need to realise that we need to be more independent," he said, "(relying) on our own farming and resources."

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Bhutan and the pursuit of happiness

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Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, is proof that happiness does not necessarily come with high income.

Timphu, Bhutan -- BHUTAN is still buzzing in elation over a royal wedding. Its hugely popular, Oxford-educated King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, 31, has just presented them with his new queen, the beautiful commoner Jetsun Pema, 21.

The Oct 13 ceremony was colourful and steeped in tradition and Buddhist religion at a monastery in the ancient capital of Punakha.

Noticeably, there were no foreign princes, no visiting heads of state at the ceremony. Just the royal family, thousands of nearby villagers and the rest of the country's 700,000 people watching the live telecast of the ceremonies on their television sets.

For the Bhutanese, the wedding was very personal. They love their young king and the kings before him and totally believe their kings love them back. Their faces flush with pride and joy when they talk of them and they directly attribute their happiness to the "humble, kind and wise" kings who have always placed their people's welfare and well-being at the top of their agenda.

The Bhutanese have much to be proud about.

Their Druk Yul (Land of the Thunder Dragon) has mountains that are still thick with trees. Their glacier-fed rivers are teeming with fish. The air is clean and, in many places, naturally pine-scented. Breathtaking mountain scenery is common.

They still grow their food in traditional ways. While we call it organic and pay a premium, it's everyday fare for the mostly vegetarian Bhutanese. The nation is an environmentalist dream.

Visitors are unlikely to see beggars or homeless people. The Bhutanese sense of family takes care of that.

Crime is rare even though many people live in poverty and have to trek hours on foot to get from one place to another.

Sexual norms are considered fairly liberal but Bhutanese are raised to observe decorum in dress and behaviour in public.

A couple come together as man and wife once they get their parents' blessings. No fuss. A man can have more than one wife. And in this fair-minded land, a woman can have more than one husband, even though this is less common.

And the surprises continue. Children streaming out of schools in traditional dress give visitors friendly grins and are quite happy to chat - in English. Yes, English is the medium of instruction.

For tourists, shopping and sightseeing is easy. There's no need to struggle in the local Dzongkha as guides and shopkeepers speak English, albeit with a heavy Indian accent as many teachers are from India.

Education and health care is free.

The Bhutanese know they have something special and they plan to keep it.

Clearly, it's a country with a unique view of life and living. Pure economic growth is not the end but just one of the means to achieve a more important objective - happiness.

This philosophy, clearly enunciated by former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, an absolute monarch who voluntarily abdicated after drawing up a roadmap to democracy, underpins Bhutan's push forward into modernisation.

Bhutan's government has taken this beyond a philosophy and beyond the usual conventional markers for GDP.

The Centre for Bhutan Studies, the government's think tank, did an exhaustive sample survey and determined that a happy society involves the four pillars of economy, culture, environment and good governance measured by 72 indicators clustered under nine domains.

A Gross National Happiness Commission (GNHC) has been formed and this commission reports directly to the prime minister and bears a heavy and two-fold responsibility.

It conducts surveys once every two years based on the indicators, crunches the results to establish where the nation's well-being is at that point and then screens all policy initiatives to ensure they enhance GNH. The first survey was conducted in 2008 and the next one in 2010.

"Every policy in the government, irrespective of where it originates, goes through the GNHC," said Karma Tshiteem, the commission's secretary in an interview while he was on a visit to Malaysia.

He said the nine domains included four - health, education, living standards, and to some extent, environment - found in conventional policy-making frameworks.

But the survey found five more domains that people care deeply about - psychological well-being, time use, community vitality, culture and good governance - often overlooked by governments but included in the unique Bhutanese approach to development.

Each of these was then broken down into indicators that total 72. Psychological well-being, for instance, includes general psychological distress indicators, emotional balance indicators, and spirituality indicators.

The community vitality, for instance, consists of family vitality, safety, reciprocity, trust, social support, socialisation and kinship density.

The first survey offered up interesting revelations, said Tshiteem.

Among others, the survey in this deeply Buddhist land discovered that 90% of Bhutanese don't meditate at all. Meditation is an indicator under psychological well-being.

Tshiteem said: "So what did we do with that knowledge? We introduced a whole set of activities which we call education for GNH in schools. One of these activities is meditation.

"It's not that our children have to sit in the lotus posture like some accomplished practitioner. The idea is to get them to experience stillness every day in their lives because that stillness is very powerful to stop all the distractions that life is made up of.

"It's been proven that this activity builds calmness.

"Like many habits that children carry into their adult lives, we hope that it will become part of their lifestyle. We feel that, irrespective of religious background, meditation has proven to be a very healthy activity for psychological or mental well-being - particularly with dealing in problems related to stress that people face in this modern work environment.

"In this case, it was just a policy response that we needed and we have introduced this throughout all schools."

However, some matters needed responses that required resource allocation, creative ideas and lengthy discussions with relevant sectors, he said.

"From the survey we saw that the indicator of trust among neighbours is poor in urban areas. We have to get creative and come up with ideas on what we need to do to build trust.

"So we look at what we used to do in our villages, which was what Bhutan really was until we started modernisation.

"In a village setting, the soul of the village is the temple. It is not only a place for worship, but the most important social space where people meet.

"So we could apply similar strategies in the urban areas. But this will require money - one of our responsibilities is identifying priorities and allocating resources - so we allocate resources to good ideas that we think about and leads to this. And of course, a lot of that will be learning whether we achieved what we want," he said.

Sometimes, the challenge is not just a direct response, strategy or resource allocation.

It's about "creating incentives for the types of choices we think are desirable," said Tshiteem who then used time use as an example.

"We have 24 hours in a day. We want to keep as a policy the use of these 24 hours equal among the three aggregates - work, leisure and rest.

"And we believe that for a truly sustainable and happy life, you cannot compromise these three for an extended time. You can go without sleep for one night, maybe, but after the second night I think it will have a tremendous impact on your well-being if you continue.

"Similarly, if you work too hard, however meaningful your work is, it will have a detrimental impact. GNH is about balance - leading a very balanced life.

"The policies involved in these new domains require time and not money. And you know, time is the only thing even money can't buy.

"If you look at the five new domains, you can see that you have to take the work-life balance very seriously.

"If you do not have enough time, then you cannot work on these areas because these areas, like the relationship between friends, will only flourish if you invest the time. There is no substitute for that," he said.

"We have created a GNH policy screening tool. It's almost like wearing spectacles. We put on this glass and look at the policy in question and we make sure all these other domains that are normally not considered in policy are given due weight.

"So, for instance, if the policy we're debating is joining WTO, we'll say 'what is the likely impact of joining WTO on stress levels in society? Is it likely to increase it, decrease it, be neutral, or do we not know what its effects might be?

"The tool is very simple but what it does is it fosters debate. Because it fosters this debate, I believe that, hopefully, the choices we make will be better and more sustainable ones. But it's still very early," he said.

Tshiteem is "absolutely" sure that Bhutan is on the right path as determined by the former king's logic of why happiness should be the object of development policy.

"Just look at every country. They are pursuing a model of development where they want double-digit growth. Everybody wants to become rich. Can you imagine what will happen if every country achieves this? I think there will be no planet left.

"It is just not sustainable. There is something badly wrong with the model of development that we have been taught, which is basically about endless and high growth, but in a world with very definite and finite resources. And yet we all continue to take this path.

"What we hope with GNH is, because you look at things in its entirety, you make different choices. And our hope is that as small as we may be, maybe we can influence development and hopefully change the agenda and the way people look at development.

"As our fourth King always said, 'You cannot divorce development from what people want from life. They are one and the same thing'.

"But somehow, we are pretending that what people want from life can be very different from development.

"Eventually, development must be about a happy life, a life where people evolve. I guess that would be a genuine measure of progress. The wealth of experiences, family, relationships and not money are the true measure of progress," he said.

However, Tshiteem was frank about the challenges ahead, pointing out that Bhutan remained dependent on development assistance from abroad.

For decades, India has been its primary donor in terms of money and the source of skilled workforce needed in many sectors, including construction, road building and hydroelectricity projects. The Indian rupee is used side-by-side with the local Ngultrum in Bhutan.

In return, Bhutan sells its hydro-electricity to India. Ironically, electricity revenue provided no less than 60% of the government's entire revenue in 2009, dramatically boosting its GDP, but only 66% of Bhutanese households and 39% of its villages are electrified.

Other donors are the Scandinavian countries, Japan and institutions such as the World Bank, United Nations and the Asian Development Bank.

Good repayment

According to the Royal Monetary Authority's annual report 2009, Bhutan's external debt was at US$779.9mil, 61% of GDP, mostly tied to hydropower projects, which have good repayment capacity.

"We still have high levels of poverty in Bhutan which is why, even as we talk about GNH, you can be sure our focus is very much on reducing poverty. Poverty reduction is the number one objective and our target is to reduce it from its current 23% to 15% or less in five years.

"And towards this end, we have a number of interventions such as building roads, irrigation, the usual conventional investment activities like drinking water, electricity, mobile activity," he said.

In addition, the young constitutional king, who retains the authority to grant land to people, had already gone "literally door-to-door" through many of the 20 provinces in the country giving out land to those who need it, Tshiteem said.

"Fortunately, land is something we have in plenty. So with all this, we have confidence that we will be able to address poverty reduction quickly," he said.

Each Bhutanese is entitled to own at least five acres but cannot own more than 25 acres.

Tiny Bhutan's GNH has already received much international interest and appears to have inspired the 34-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) happiness index, more tentatively called YourBetterLife Index, which was launched in May as the OECD celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

The index covers 11 areas - housing, incomes, employment, social relationships, education, the environment, the administration of institutions, health, general satisfaction, security and the balance between work and family - and is the first concrete result of a report by former Nobel economics prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz.

The Paris-based OECD hopes to make the index applicable to other countries soon, beginning with emerging economies such as Brazil, according to OECD officials quoted by news reports.

In July, the United Nations General Assembly passed, without dissent, a Bhutanese-initiated resolution recognising the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal and noting that this goal is not reflected in GDP.

Modernisation means change. But change is what the GNHC has to manage by continuing to tweak its GNH model to keep track of what the Bhutanese people care about and make sure the fledgling democratic government continues to deliver well-being to its people.

As Tshiteem puts it, "we are in the early stages of this very exciting journey".

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