Sitting in his office in Bhutan’s sleepy capital, newspaper editor Tenzing Lamsang muses on the dramatic impact of cell phone technology on the remote Himalayan kingdom known as the “last Shangri-La”.
“Bhutan is jumping from the feudal age to the modern age,” said Mr. Lamsang, editor of The Bhutanese biweekly and online journal. “It’s bypassing the industrial age.”
As the last country in the world to get television and one which measures its performance with a “Gross National Happiness” yardstick, Bhutan might have been expected to be a holdout against mobile technology. While monks clad in traditional saffron robes remain a common sight on the streets of Thimpu, they now have to dodge cell phone users whose eyes are glued to their screens.
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It has a largely rural population of just 7,50,000, but Bhutan’s two cellular networks have 5,50,000 subscribers. And the last official figures in 2012 showed more than 1,20,000 Bhutanese had some kind of mobile Internet connectivity.
Wedged between China and India, the sparsely populated “Land of the Thunder Dragon” got its first television sets only in 1999, at a time when less than a quarter of households had electricity. The change in lifestyle has coincided with an equally dramatic transformation of the political system, with the monarchy ceding absolute power and allowing democratic elections in 2008.
The second nationwide elections took place last year, bringing Tshering Tobgay into office. In a recent interview with AFP, Mr. Tobgay underlined how he regarded technology as a force for good and not something to be resisted. “Technology is not destructive. It’s good and can contribute to prosperity for Bhutan.”
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“Cellular phones became a reality 10 years ago. We adopted it very well, almost everybody has a cellular phone, that’s the reality.”