The view from Bhutan: The temptations and traps of development
by Pran Chopra
The tourist literature rightly describes Bhutan as "A Kingdom in
the Sky...a paradise in the real sense...unmarred by modern highways, railroads,
and industrial plants". At the same time, from its seclusion in the fastness of
the Himalayas, Bhutan is beginning to look out on the modern world, carefully
choosing such pieces of our times as it thinks will fit its own timeless world,
but the choice is not easy. The need for change pulls one way, the cultural
enchantment of Bhutan's colourful past pulls the other. Now that China's
modern-minded rulers are opening up its contiguous neighbour, Tibet, Bhutan is
probably the most closed country in the world. It is closed by its geography as
well as by its strongly conservationist monarchy, a religious and cultural child
of Tibet. Nevertheless, Bhutan has begun to put a foot out the door.
The quickest and most modern way of reaching Bhutan is by a
90-minute flight from Calcutta in one of Bhutan's two 16-passenger planes. The
aircraft lands at Paro, itself a gem, at the country's only airstrip, then
follows an equally lovely one-hour drive to the capital, Thimpu, nearly 2 500
metres above sea level. The alternative is a 14-hour drive to Thimpu from
Baggdogra, the largest air services junction in northeastern India.
Either journey gives you a good view of two of the three
distinguishing features of Bhutan's topography. One is the forest cover over
half the country's 46 500 km2. The other is the dragon's-tooth
pattern of narrow valleys, most of them running north to south, which appear
abruptly above the Indian plains. The third feature is the snow-covered peaks of
the Himalayan barrier in the north and the bleak glacial wastes that lie at
their feet. If you fly to Thimpu on a clear day, you see some of the snow
ranges, if you go by road, you can rest by the banks of the many beautiful
snow-fed rivers and streams, which are one of Bhutan's outlets to the changing
times.
South of the Himalayan watershed, which separates India from
China, and moving further south to the Indo-Gangetic plains, lie the 360 000
km2 of the Himalayan region. This area is an enormous water trap. All
the great rivers that water the 4.5 million km2 of South Asia are
indebted to this catchment. Some-the greatest of the rivers of Pakistan,
northern India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh-are indebted directly, because
much, if not most, of their water comes from the melting of the snows in the
Himalayas or from the rains that fall on the Himalayan slopes. Others-the more
distant rivers of South India and Sri Lanka-are indebted to the Himalayas
indirectly, because, with the Indian Ocean, this mountain barrier creates the
monsoon cycle, the source of most of the water of South Asia, surface and
underground, that does not come directly from melting snows.
A fragile ecology. These waters are the greatest economic asset
of the billion people of South Asia, apart from their own labour and the farms
to which they apply it. But acute problems have also arisen from the close
juxtaposition between the Himalayan ecology and the enormous mass of the South
Asian humanity, especially the Indo-Gangetic population. The Himalayan ecology
is young and fragile. The pressure of humanity upon it is great. Even where the
population is small in relation to the total area, it is very great in relation
to the cultivable area, three or four times as great as in the plains.
Therefore, cultivation keeps creeping further and further up on steeper and
steeper slopes, first causing loss of precious forest, then loss of soil, and
then flood havoc both in the hills and on the plains. In the Indian
mid-Himalayas, the forest cover is generally estimated to have declined from
over 25 per cent to below 10 per cent in the last decades. The drop in the
man-land ratio has also been sharp: in parts of the Indian Himalayas it fell by
almost half in the two decades between 1961 and 1981. Downstream silting has
become devastating. According to studies of 21 river projects in India, the
siltation is occurring more than two-and-a-half times faster than was estimated
when the projects were drawn up. Since ill-considered siting of dams and
inadequate reinforcing of their upstream ecology are themselves causing erosion
and the resultant silting, many projects have turned out to be self-defeating.
The average annual flood damage from these causes in India alone is estimated at
about $135 million.
Awareness of this problem is far more acute now than it used to
be, and the debate on it in India has become increasingly sharp. One healthy
consequence has been that the cost of protecting the surrounding ecology, at
site as well as upstream and down, is now included in the cost estimates of a
project. This means that the downstream beneficiaries must pay for the
protection of the ecological interests of the upstream local populations-and in
the process, of course, they also fortify their own interests against loss
through damage to the ecology of the project zone. But one kind of damage is
proving difficult to overcome: a suspicion that has grown among the hill peoples
about the motives of the people in the plains, which is retarding what could be
a very healthy symbiosis between the Himalayan hills and the plains below.
One of the most important resources of the hill areas is
gravity, which alone can convert their enormous water flows into cash. Water
harnessed for downstream uses can be their most lucrative export. This can
indeed mean some loss of their scarce and precious land. But few alternative
uses of that land can yield as much income for the people who own it as the rent
they would get if true rent for the land were fairly charged to the downstream
user as part of the price of the project's benefits to him. And even with this
fair rent, the downstream user would still find hydroelectric power cheaper than
any other source of bulk power. The scope for this mutual benefit is enormous.
But so far it has barely been touched. Recent Indian studies have estimated that
between now and the year 2000 the demand for electrical energy will grow more
than four times in Bangladesh and three times in India, Nepal, and Pakistan.
That there is plenty of scope for hydroelectric power to meet that demand can be
judged from the fact that, even taking into account hydroelectric power projects
still under construction, India has developed only 16.9 per cent of its
hydroelectric power potential, Pakistan 12 per cent, Bangladesh 3.5 per cent,
and Nepal 0.23 per cent.
Counting the political cost. Here then is a vast untapped
reservoir of wealth for all these countries, whether one looks at hydroelectric
power as a product for direct sales or as an input into the economy with a
strong multiplier effect. But because of past experience of long-term benefits
of the people of the plains, the hill people have become very resentful of
future hydroelectric projects. As a result, political costs have been added to
the other costs of these projects.
While there is reluctance enough among a country's own hill
people to have in their midst more projects for their own plains people, there
is even greater reluctance, much more difficult to overcome, among hill
countries like Nepal and Bhutan to accommodate more projects for the benefit of
other countries. This affects India particularly because it is the main
customer, and an insatiable one, for the hydroelectric potential of these two
mountain kingdoms. And yet, Nepal and Bhutan cannot wish away the fact that sale
of hydroelectric power to the growing industries of the Indo-Gangetic plain can
be a richer source of income for them (and for India's own Himalayan area) than
any other resources that they possess. Nor can India wish away the fact that on
account of their proximity, suitable hydroelectric sites in the Himalayas can be
the most economical source of power for the northern Indian industries.
This is the essence of the Himalayan symbiosis. But the past
lies heavy upon it. This is the background against which the hesitant
development of hydroelectric power in Bhutan should be viewed, though there are
some other factors which explain the hesitation. Bhutan is even more
conveniently located than Nepal as the source of hydroelectric power to the
Bihar-West Bengal industrial belt, which has traditionally been the biggest in
India. Bhutan's topography too makes it very suitable. Only short runs down from
their snow sources, which are more steadily reliable than rain sources, the
rivers of Bhutan reach convenient sites for the generation of hydroelectric
power. Because their valleys are narrow and their gradients fast, with
relatively small amounts of run-off, these rivers can build up high heads and
deep drops for generating power. Because the valley floors are narrow, not much
land is submerged, and such submersion as may be unavoidable would not affect
many people because Bhutan is the most thinly populated of the South Asian
states. Any loss of agricultural produce could easily be met from India as part
of the costs of the project. In all respects Bhutan is distinctly better placed
than Nepal. Yet Bhutan has some quite understandable objections to overcome in
working out any mutually beneficial arrangement with India.
A perpetual resource. In the absence of any systematic survey,
an authoritative guess, cited by the World Bank among others, is that Bhutan's
hydroelectric potential is about 20 000 megawatts. As a resource it exceeds the
country's forest wealth, great though that is, not only in absolute terms. If
the forests were to be exploited as a competing resource, they would very soon
go into diminishing returns, whereas a hydroelectric resource perpetually renews
itself as soon as it is tapped, if its exploitation is well planned. Yet, Bhutan
so far generates only three-and-a-half megawatts of hydroelectric power. It
imports about half that amount from India, and meets most of the rest of its
energy needs by burning wood, of which an average Bhutanese consumes about
one-third more than an average Sri Lankan and half again as much as an average
Nepalese, even though Sri Lanka and even Nepal have a much wider per caput
energy consumption than Bhutan.
Power generation has been given a big boost in Bhutan's current
development plan, in which it gets 16.5 per cent of the total outlay and 22 per
cent of the investment in development, as against 17.4 per cent and 22.7 per
cent for industry, mining, commerce, and trade put together. But a better
example of the possible is a project which does not figure in the plan at all.
It is the Chukha hydroelectric project, being built by India. Unfortunately,
this project is also a good example of the impediments to the possible. This
project on the Wangchu in southwestern Bhutan involves no storage and little
denial of land to other uses. Yet it will have a peak generating capacity of 336
megawatts, or about a hundred times the entire hydroelectric generating capacity
installed at present. Even its lean season firm power will be 100 megawatts. It
will divert the waters of the Wangchu through an underground channel into an
underground drop of 465 metres to work four generators of 84 megawatts each, all
of them housed entirely underground in one of the largest manmade cavities ever
dug into a mountain anywhere in the world. The first two generators were
scheduled to go into production by the spring of 1986 and the remaining two by
the end of the year. The project has been financed, designed, and executed
entirely by India, 60 per cent as an outright grant and 40 per cent as a 5 per
cent loan. But the project will be owned by Bhutan and run by a joint
Indo-Bhutanese management authority. Bhutan will have the first and unlimited
right to the power for its own present and future needs; India will buy the rest
at a negotiated rate. Bhutan gets three things from the project: power for its
needs, income from the sale of a big bulk of power to India, and ownership of a
project which, on the scale of Bhutan, is so large that by now it accounts for
more than 15 per cent of the gross domestic product. The outlays upon it in the
current plan are, according to the World Bank, equal to all the other outlays
put together. The net return to Bhutan from the project will be equal to about
70 per cent of the total government receipts from all sources in 1982-83. What
India gets out of it is the right to buy power that is surplus to Bhutan's needs
for eastern India's industries, which could be as much as 300 megawatts.
Bhutan's priorities. And yet, further development of the
hydroelectric potential of the Wangchu, even on such favourable terms,
encounters Bhutanese hesitation. Downstream from Chukha, additional projects
with a capacity of 2 000 megawatts have been identified, but there is some
reluctance to go ahead with them. While reluctance may seem strange to
downstream users, it makes some sense in terms of Bhutanese priorities, though
it is open to doubt whether all aspects thereof have received due consideration.
The first hesitation, and one which is openly articulated, is
the most understandable. Chukha represents a quantum jump in project development
in Bhutan. It is 15 times the size of the next largest project, a
300-tons-per-day cement plant at Penden, in western Bhutan, which was also built
by India and is working at nearly 100 per tent capacity. (The use pattern here
is also the same: it meets Bhutan's entire domestic needs and India buys the
rest.) Experiencing such a sudden stepping up of scale for the first time,
Bhutan wants to see how well the present Chukha phase works for it before
committing itself to further phases-and not just how well it works as a power
plant, but what happens when a stone of this size is thrown into the quiet of
the secluded cultural and ecological pond of Bhutan. The resistance of India's
own hill people to projects meant for India reverberates in Bhutan as well. As
Bhutan sees it, more projects mean more imported workers at all levels, because
Bhutan has so few of its own to contribute. The projects would mean more money
for Bhutan. But Bhutan wonders what more money would do to the habits of the
Bhutanese.
It is precisely for these hesitations that, so far, Bhutan has
also kept at bay foreign tourism developers who have been pressing hard to come
in. Bhutan prefers to raise its tourism income by charging more per tourist than
by letting in more of them. Power projects themselves may be culturally more
neutral than foreign tourists are, but they do tend to open up the country more
rapidly than the rulers in Thimpu are willing to see happen yet. Anxiety on this
score appears frequently in the King's speeches. The current five-year plan also
says that "the satisfaction of rising expectations must be consistent with the
framework of the traditional institutions that characterize Bhutan as a unique
national and cultural entity.... The government is clear that education must
also serve another fundamental end, viz. that of preserving the traditional
values and rich culture of the country."
Hesitations about a more rapid pace of development have another
dimension too. Over 90 per cent of Bhutan's imports and exports are with India.
Even without counting Chukha and another important Indian-aided item, the
development of roads, about 50 per cent of Bhutan's expenditure on development
comes in the form of assistance from India. Bhutan sees this as a kind of
single-country relationship which will only grow deeper unless Bhutan has a
choice of customers for the fruits of its development. This choice is not yet
visible. Sources of aid to Bhutan have grown, but not sources of supply and
markets for produce. So Bhutan thinks it may be better to wait and to let
development proceed at a slower pace.
But in the midst of these priorities, most of them not only
understandable but sensible too, Bhutan has given less thought to the idea that
it is better to depend upon a customer than upon a donor. Most of the aid it
gets from India today comes in the form of direct or indirect grants and
near-grants. What it will get from Chukha, however, will be in the form of sale
of what is made in Bhutan. Once it gets going, this will be a buyer-seller
relationship, despite the fact that Chukha itself is also a product of the same
system of grants and near-grants. If further development of its river waters
takes Bhutan further into that buyer seller relationship, perhaps with Bhutan
diverting some of its earnings from Chukha into buying a real ownership share in
future projects, Thimpu might be able to buy at quite a low price a relationship
with India which would be more satisfying for
it.
