Poverty has rapidly fallen in Bhutan, “with its national poverty rate falling from 28 percent to 11.6 percent between 2017 and 2022,” reports The Doomslayer.
“By nearly any measure, Bhutan is the world’s most mountainous country. Its average elevation is 10,760 feet, and mountains cover 98.8% of its total area. Some say that Bhutan is the highest country on earth at 3280 meters. It is also the home to the highest unclimbed mountain peak. Gangkhar Puensum, at 7,570 meters (24,840 ft). It’s Bhutan’s highest peak and the world’s highest unclimbed mountain. Bhutan has prohibited climbing mountains above 6,000 meters (20,000 ft) as local customs consider these peaks sacred homes of spirits and deities,” notes Yamashita Photo.
“Key drivers” behind the fall in poverty in Bhutan “include robust economic growth, improved labor market outcomes, enhanced agricultural productivity, effective COVID-19 relief programs, and strong remittance inflows,” the World Bank says. Bhutan also has abundant hydroelectric power.
“Bhutan is the largest beneficiary of India’s foreign aid,” Wikipedia notes. Some view that as ironic, because Bhutan is a predominantly Buddhist nation that violently drove out tens of thousands of Hindu ethnic Nepalese people. India is an overwhelmingly Hindu country. But India props up Bhutan as a buffer against China, which invaded India’s northern frontier region in 1962, and seized control of neighboring Tibet in the 1950s. A majority of people in Bhutan are ethnically Tibetan.
As a human rights group explains,
In the late 1980s Bhutanese elites regarded a growing ethnic Nepali population as a demographic and cultural threat. The government enacted discriminatory citizenship laws directed against ethnic Nepalis, that stripped about one-sixth of the population of their citizenship and paved the way for their expulsion.
After a campaign of harassment that escalated in the early 1990s, Bhutanese security forces began expelling people, first making them sign forms renouncing claims to their homes and homeland. “The army took all the people from their houses,” a young refugee told me. “As we left Bhutan, we were forced to sign the document. They snapped our photos. The man told me to smile, to show my teeth. He wanted to show that I was leaving my country willingly, happily, that I was not forced to leave.”
Today, about 108,000 of these stateless Bhutanese are living in seven refugee camps in Nepal. The Bhutanese authorities have not allowed a single refugee to return.
