EDITORIAL

The case of water and electricity being cut to a building in Damphu for Sunday religious gathering in the Karaoke Hall has attracted much interest. The Dzongda seems to have been driven by a fear of the particular religion allegedly spreading rapidly in Tsirang Dzongkhag, and from the comments online …

No Member of Parliament or party candidate will say it, but one of the main reasons why the National Assembly MPs made such a strong push for the Prado Quota is in part to recover their election expenses. The Election Commission of Bhutan (ECB) does provide Nu 150,000 per candidate …

In 2023 when there was no money in the treasury due to the poor state of the economy, the government gave a 50 percent pay hike for MPs, civil servants and public servants which would cost Nu 6 bn a year. This was money Bhutan did not have and the …

A large batch of Bhutanese families are leaving this year as part of the Diversity Visa recipients of the USA. One such family had a civil servant husband and a wife with a job in the private sector, their own house and they had no real economic motives to move …

The victory of President Donald Trump offers important lessons for all countries across the world, including Bhutan, and it is thus important to understand why he won, especially since USA is the sole superpower on the global stage. The victory of Trump is a clear backlash to unrestrained globalization since …

The new upcoming Thimphu Design Code as a part of the new Thimphu Structure Plan is an important change and rights many wrongs with urban development. In the past few decades, even for all the planning, Thimphu had a rapid and chaotic growth and this is visible when one drives …

In between the clean wage hike of 2022 and the actual pay hike of 2023 public servants got a hike of 55 to 76 percent. This hike further widened the already existing pay gaps between the government sector and the private sector. The private sector was always small and weak …

The Royal Visit to Australia was historic on many counts, but it also showed that the core of Bhutanese identity and the glue that binds us all is our King and the Royal Family. The Royal Visit to Australia by no means was an easy one. To start with, the …

The 1,200 MW Punatsangchu I project and the 1,020 MW Punatsangchu II project have been in the headlines for mainly wrong reasons in the last one-decade. The failures in these two projects have been chalked down to ‘Geological Surprises,’ but a closer look shows that it is not just geological …

On the final farewell dinner a foreign guest at the Bhutan Innovation Forum said he would be shedding tears on his flight. His stay and experience in Bhutan deeply touched him. Similarly the BIF was an eye opening experience for Bhutanese of all stripes attending it. A senior civil servant …