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The toilet and the strain

19 December 2008

Employment is a basic human need. With unemployment at 3.2% today, about seven thousand of our welleducated youth are out in the cold. It will take more than a ‘Labour Market Information’ from the Ministry of Labour to provide some desperate relief. Forty percent of our population is on the waiting list of the next 20 years.

This is one of the moral challenges of our times.

Employment generation will be the litmus test for the new government. The shift from an agricultural society to a knowledge-based one is difficult. Even with shortages of education research officers, municipal officers and others, the civil sector is a designated ‘Zero Growth’ area. The private sector is faltering with a weak manufacturing base and a ‘paper-tiger’ Labour Act.

Rapid urbanization will be tomorrow’s reality. By 2009, the majority of the global population will live in cities. In Bhutan, unemployment is at 4.9% in urban centers and 2.5% in rural areas. This equation will be drastically altered with the effect of World Trade Organisation on rural livelihoods. The government must address this.

The majority of our people live from hand to mouth. We have a “fringe population”, where about 23% of people exist below the poverty line and about 5% in abject hunger. Rising under-employment must also be accounted for to get the whole picture.

We must generate and enhance rural employment, reform our educational and vocational institutes along professional lines, and according to market realities, tap foreign investment in knowledge-based fields such as information technology. The dignity of blue collar jobs will be raised only when their low wage is raised.

We have yet to tap into the wealth of our well-educated human resource. The Philippines government has sent abroad more than 8% or 7.3 million of its people. Those Filipinos sent home 20.3 % of the country’s income. We could do that. Our school graduates are highly educated with very good English. The Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra wanted Bhutanese as English teachers in Thailand. And yet hundreds of educated Bhutanese are rejected by embassies in the region. The government must facilitate such prospects.

The war on unemployment is a fight for instituting the conditions for individual dignity. The fate of recovering addicts relapsing, battered women, blue collar jobs, sugar daddies, juvenile delinquency, psychotic behaviour and other social malaise hang in the balance.

The time to complete a toilet’s construction is before nature’s call. Not after.

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Posted by Bhutan Observer · Filed Under Editorial 

Comments

3 Responses to “The toilet and the strain”

  1. dark angel on December 19th, 2008 12:18 pm

    How I wish all the above changes could be put into effect!

    You guys have done a good research and kudos to you for having come up with practical solutions (suggestions).

    …but I wish the tone of the write up was richer. I’m not much of a fan of High School English Teacher! oops!

  2. Yelnith on December 20th, 2008 2:10 am

    Your example of Philippines government sending out 7.3 millions could be true. But do not forget that they are technically qualified and has the skill based knowledge. Just merely churning out high school graduates with good English, and expecting the government to facilitate them to go out is an tall order. You have addressed the problems but not the root cause.

    Your need to construct toiled was good foresight , but the failure to see how/who and what it takes to build them was short of vision.

  3. kinley on December 29th, 2008 5:10 pm

    yelnith, the Philipines example was just an example Bhutan could look upto. What wrong is there, if we could send hundreds of Bhutanese english honors graduates to work outside. or for that matter, mennial labourers-or whatsoever.

    There are basically two advantages, pressure and competition for employment opporunities at home will be lessened, and these bunch who go out there brings in the hard buck. They could get by with a little help from the governmenmt. What’s the big deal when we ask the government to facilitate the process?

    The toilet metaphor was beautiful. Actually traditional wisdom has always been. yelnith, the toilet is for you and me, and many others who are destitute, or will be soon. it is for the jobless who walk the streets, with cracked lips, thin wallets, feeling lost and lonely. what does it take to build it?

    It is about giving them a feeling that they belong, that they are secure, that they are happy. And when an individual is not able to get a job out of which he can live a decent live, the state should come to their rescue. it takes the state to play a role.

    The state should intervene because a rich dad’s son does not snatch a women’s handbag in broad day light, so that a class 10 or 12 graduate does not give into drugs and just OD out in a dingy hotel room, so that jobless youth do not beat up a woman just to take her money in the middle of the night, so that youth remains away from crime, so that our police force who is the least paid do not have to patrol the streets and dark corners of the city.

    It takes just a little, to say, but a lot of doing. But we can’t be complacent. The government cannot be so. And Not the MEDIA, in any case. And whatever issues the editorial has raised thus far is laudable.

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