Happiness will soon be an academic subject in Assam’s Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC).
From April, the BTC government is set to launch its Mission Happiness across the 9,000 sq. km Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) comprising four districts – Baksa, Chirang, Kokrajhar and Udalgiri.
The reign of peace in BTR since the signing of the Bodo Accord in January 2020 helped conceive the idea of teaching happiness by first understanding the reasons that make different categories of people unhappy, BTC chief Pramod Boro said on March 23.
“The possibility of introducing peace and happiness as an interlinked subject to be taught with all mainstream subjects was discussed during a knowledge festival organised in February. We made a declaration during the event that a knowledge centre would be set up in the Bodoland University and this centre will run the school of happiness,” he told The Hindu during the 4th Asian Kho Kho Championship at Tamulpur.
The knowledge festival was held in Kokrajhar, the headquarters of BTR about 240 km west of Guwahati. Tamulpur, also in BTR, is about 75 km north of Guwahati.
All stakeholders have been involved for developing the course material after interacting with different categories of people to understand and assess the factors responsible for their “anger, frustration and unhappiness”, Mr Boro said.
The stakeholders include former extremists, government officials, political leaders, civil society members, representatives of various ethnic, linguistic and religious communities and the “downtrodden people at the bottom of the barometer of happiness”.
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BTR, formerly called Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District, has a history of extremism triggered by a Statehood movement. A series of communal violence was a by-product of the extremism that was tamed after the accord among four outlawed groups, the Central and Assam Governments, and the influential All Bodo Students’ Union.
Mr. Boro insisted that Mission Happiness would be an inexpensive exercise.
“It entails listening to each other, healing each other’s wounds and finding a common path to happiness. The idea is to recycle the old social values with a modern, digital makeover to ensure all humans coexist happily and let the animals, birds and plants be happy too by not destroying the ecosystem,” he said.
The spontaneity with which the people of Tamulpur and beyond helped organise the 4th Asian Kho Kho championship reflected the general happiness after peace returned to BTR, Mr Boro said. “An event on this scale at a makeshift venue perhaps speaks a lot about the mindset in BTR now. We hope to build on this and promote BTR as one of the most peaceful and happiest places on earth to explore and enjoy,” he said.
BTR adjoins Bhutan, where the government has been guided by the Gross National Happiness or Gross Domestic Happiness, an index used since 2008 to measure the collective happiness and well-being of the Himalayan country’s population.
