The Bhutanese Leading the way.
Even almost a year later the talk of the town or the nation is still the huge Australia rush, which only seems to be getting bigger by the day with no end in sight.
It cannot be denied that the main cause of the rush is economic in nature as Australia offers a much better income and additional factors are better education and healthcare, less red tape, better access to finance, less hierarchy, more freedoms etc.
It must also be acknowledged that we are losing our best and brightest not only in terms of seasoned civil servants or other professionals, but also young and bright college graduates.
However, the Australia rush in many ways is not a failure, but the success of the development path that Bhutan has taken.
Our rapid advances in health, education and other indicators coupled with political and social stability has meant that we built a large, healthy and well educated workforce who can speak good English.
There is now in demand in Australia and other places and we are supplying our best export, which is our people.
In comparison, countries like Nepal and Bangladesh also have a large expat population, but the majority of them are in the lower socio-economic profile with the bulk of them doing menial jobs in India, a large number in middle-east also stuck mainly in construction jobs and lucky few in developed countries making the real money.
The Australia Rush in that sense is also a success of our development journey.
However, the mistake that we made was we did not plan on what to do with this well educated, bright and young labour force.
For too long our officials were happy with the figures on education enrollment rates and improving life expectancy, but not much thought or effort was put into the next phase of our development.
The lost decade from 2008 to as recent as 2020 saw our officials put all the eggs in the hydro basket.
The result is now bitter sweet for us in many ways, and so it is high time to think out of the box.
All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
Albert Einstein