Bhutan's deepening unemployment crisis

The Bhutanese Finance Minister, Yeshi Zimba, has said that one of the biggest economic challenges facing his country is finding employment for 40% of the population aged under 20 years.

"It's one of the major concerns that we have," said Mr Zimba, "and it's made more complicated by the fact that we have such a well educated workforce.

"In the past when people left school they went to work on the land, but today people seem more and more eager to come to the capital Thimpu and other towns in the kingdom to find more lucrative employment."

Mr Zimba said that there was a mismatch in his country between people's employment aspirations and the work available.

"Globalisation can provide us with many opportunities," he said, "but it also means that few people can expect to have a job for life as they did in yesteryear."

Migrant worries

Many young Bhutanese consider themselves too well-educated to do menial work, which is why the country has employed thousands of Indian expatriates to do blue-collar, building and road construction work.

While there is no clear data on the exact number of Indian migrant workers in Bhutan, it is thought to be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.

Most of them work either as construction workers or as domestic help although some are engaged in Bhutan's small industrial sector.

They enter the country on the same basis as South Asian workers in many Gulf countries: usually they must be sponsored by their employer who must also be prepared to guarantee their wages.

"For a small country, the question of migrant workers is always a very serious matter," said Mr Zimba, "and because of this we have taken remedial measures over the past few months in terms of having stricter requirements for expatriate labour.

"But in fact, I think our reliance on external labour will reduce in the future because we are mechanising more and more."

Rural emphasis

The kingdom today finds itself in the position of not having enough labourers on the one hand, while having too many over-qualified people on the other.

"While I don't think we face a serious unemployment problem, the government considers it important to try and dissuade people from moving from rural to urban areas.

"Our streets are not paved with gold and many of these people would be better off staying on the land," Mr Zimba said.

Bhutan remains an agrarian society, and 70% of the people still live and work in rural areas.

The minister said that Bhutan was no different from other countries grappling with the difficulties of rural-to-urban migration.

"What we are trying to do now is have a balanced development whereby the opportunity to earn a good living is also available in the villages and the districts," he said.

"That's why the government is putting so much emphasis on rural development."