Video Nights in Thimphu

As recently as the late 70s, it was possible for the Berkeley professor Leo Rose to write in his Politics of Bhutan that most families had as much land at their disposal as they could cultivate, and that in many villages the local authorities still had land available for distribution to any family that wanted it. Things have changed now. With population increasing at more than three percent and the decision to withdraw tseri (shifting cultivation, known as jhum further east) land from production, pressure is growing on land in Druk Yul, including on the 72 percent of the country still under forest cover.

Migration from villages to urban centres, the all-too-common phenomenon elsewhere which Bhutan might have been spared, is increasing. Thimphu Valley´s annual growth rate of 10 percent means it will reach its calculated limit of around 60,000 persons in just a few more years. Ironically, it is Bhutan´s very success in extending basic education deep into the rural areas that is responsible for this. Young people are using their education to seek alternatives to the drudgery of semi-subsistence agriculture.   As the UNDP put it in typical donor agency politesse to the sixth Bhutan Aid Meeting in Geneva earlier this year, "employment has the potential of becoming one of Bhutan´s critical development issues". Not that the Thimphu government is not doing anything about it. It has ambitious family planning targets – to increase the contraceptive prevalence rate from 25 percent at present to 36 percent by 2002 and to reduce fertility from the current level of 5.6 to 2 surviving children per woman by 2012.