on the spot
Tavleen Singh
This week I write from Thimpu. And, before you begin to think this is going to be just another travelogue about finding Shangri La I would like to clarify that this is not that kind of piece and my reason for writing it is very different. It is to show how much we in India can learn from this tiny Himalayan kingdom that for centuries remained isolated from the world. In case you are already beginning to think it is bizarre to suggest that mighty India should learn anything from little Bhutan let me give you some context.
In the past two decades there is much in India that has changed for the better. A huge middle class has come into being that is acutely conscious of the failings of our political leaders. This is good. In our cities there is more prosperity than there has ever been before. This is good. And, even in rural parts there are few places left where poverty is so horrific that one failed crop can lead to starvation deaths on a large scale. This is good. There may not have been as much improvement in standards of education but at least everyone now wants to send their children to school and this is in itself a big change. But, in the process of India’s engagement with modernity and change huge new problems have been born and it is here that we can learn from Bhutan.
I became aware of this from the moment I landed at Paro airport and saw that the people who designed the airport had ensured that it preserved a Bhutanese aesthetic in its architecture. It resembles a traditional Bhutanese fortress from the outside and inside the terminal painted murals line the walls and on so ordinary a thing as the immigration desks there are small Bhutanese motifs. In India we should have been able to preserve something distinctive in the airports we have built in old cities like Jaipur and Hyderabad but we have not and this is sad. But, it was not till I got to Thimpu that I became aware of the first big lesson that India can learn from our tiny neighbor.
Thimpu is an exquisitely planned city that despite rapid modernization in the past ten years has managed to retain a sense of order and cleanliness. I spent two days visiting temples, ancient paper factories, monasteries, a 16th century fortress and a mini zoo. I wandered through little alleys in the main bazaar and drove up to the highest point in the city where a magnificent brass statue of the Buddha has been built and nowhere on these wanderings did I see one heap of uncollected garbage or one unsightly slum. When I compared this with our own cities and towns I could not help wondering why our town planners are so incapable of proper planning and why our municipal governments so incapable of ensuring basic standards of civic hygiene.
On Bhutan’s urbanization answers came when I met the Minister of Economic Affairs who currently has additional charge of Foreign Affairs at a dinner on my second night in Thimpu. Mr. Lyonpo Khandu Wangchuk told me that one of the governance reforms that had happened even in the time when Bhutan was an absolute monarchy was a devolution of administrative powers to elected representatives at a local level. After the transition to a constitutional monarchy began in 2008 Thimpu got an elected Mayor and this has made all the difference. When are policymakers in India going to realize that this is a reform we need to make urgently? Cities the size of Mumbai cannot be governed effectively by chief ministers so they deteriorate inevitably into centres of squalor and disease.
Mr. Wangchuk was a fund of information about all things Bhutanese. He told me about the changes that have happened since television and the Internet were allowed into a country that till 1999 was among the most isolated in the world. He said that there had been a conscious effort to use the Internet for its more beneficial uses like e-governance and that television had been allowed in carefully. I can report that if you want to see an exercise of India’s soft power all you need do is wander about the shops and restaurants in Thimpu and see how many people (especially women) are addicted to Indian TV serials. It is from them that they have learned a smattering of Hindi.
Tourism is another area in which India can learn a lesson or two from Bhutan. Today Bhutan attracts more than 100,000 foreign tourists a year and they have brought with them foreign exchange and modern ideas but because of the Bhutanese Government’s emphasis on preservation of the country’s culture and its environment the degradation that has happened in popular Indian tourist destinations is not evident. The Minister said it was the wisdom of the fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, they had to thank for this. He had become conscious of the need for sustainable development decades before it became fashionable and worked with it always in mind. Today 80% of Bhutan retains its forest cover. Compare this with what is happening to forests in India and it makes you want to weep.
To end on a happy note may I say that the Taj Hotel in Thimpu is one of the most beautiful hotels I have ever stayed in anywhere in the world. Its architecture closely resembles ancient Bhutanese fortresses so it has high walls and a vast stone courtyard with a Buddhist shrine in the middle of it. When guests arrive they are given the option of going down to the courtyard and receiving a blessing and a sacred thread from the resident lama. As I received my blessing on a cold grey evening last week I got the sense of being transported back in time to an older Bhutan of ancient rituals and secretive monasteries. This sense of magic stayed with me through the three days I spent in Bhutan and I could not help remembering that there was a time not so very long ago that there was this same sense of magic in so many parts of India. It now remains in very few but what does remain is something we need to hang on to while embracing newness and modernity. Bhutan shows how this can be done.
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