People make up national wealth: PM
World HRD Congress 15 February, 2010 – The wealth of a nation is neither its economic strength nor its natural resources but its people, what economists call “human capital”, therefore, the need to invest in human resources.
This was the message in Prime Minister Jigmi Y Thinley’s keynote address at the world HRD congress, which was held in India on February 12.
Lyonchhoen said the wealth of an organisation was, more than anything else, its human resource, a major challenge for organisations to retain, attract, build and motivate. “This becomes ever more difficult in an era when such noble values as organisational loyalty are rare,” he said.
Having served in various capacities in government as a human resource manager, founder secretary of the royal civil service commission and then as the head of the education system, Lyonchhoen said human resource was the most powerful element, which conditioned the behaviour, strengths and weaknesses of an organisation.
Lyonchhoen Jigmi Y Thinley also said that, like many countries and especially as a developing country, Bhutan had its own visions and aspirations for the future, but within which pursuit of happiness was a conscious goal of every Bhutanese citizen.
The deteriorating global environment and its repercussions that came in the form of global warming was the consequence of our obsession with economic growth, he said. “We are over producing everything at the cost of over extraction of the limited natural resources,” he said. “What we can’t eat, wear, flaunt or store, we consign to waste.”
The PM said that, in Bhutan, vivid signs of climate change were already showing. “Not the least of these is the withdrawal of the Himalayan glaciers that are the sources of our river systems,” he said, adding that should global warming continue at the current rate, all of the glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear in the near future. “[That will be] after having devastated life and property along our valleys by glacial lake outburst floods,” he said. He emphasised the need therefore for an understanding of the true meaning of development, wealth or prosperity in relation to happiness to set human society on a sustainable and meaningful path.
“GNH is a proposition for such a change,” he said. “We, in Bhutan, believe happiness is the single most important desire of all citizens and must be the purpose of development.”
He explained that GNH guided the government to create conditions conducive for its citizens to pursue happiness, which it did through a four-pronged strategy, popularly referred to as the four pillars.
Sustainability, under equitable and sustainable socio-economic development prescribed the moral responsibility of each generation to ensure that development is pursued to benefit not only the present but future generations as well, he said.
Lyonchhoen said his government had until 2013 to accomplish its programmes to alleviate rural poverty and close the gap between the rich and poor by providing motorable access to every village, electricity for every home, mobile phone connectivity and adequately staffed and equipped government hospital, among others.
The second pillar requiring preservation and promotion of culture, he said, was measured against the indicators of cultural resilience, community vitality and psychological well being.
“We think true wealth has to do more with relational wealth and social strengths than material acquisition,” he said.
On environmental conservation, lyonchhoen Jigmi Y Thinley said the integrity of environment was an everyday concern for a country of highly vulnerable mountain ecology.
Besides constitutional mandate for the country to maintain a minimum forest cover of 60 percent, a voluntary pledge to the international community was also made to remain carbon negative and instead serve as a global carbon sink, the lyonchhoen said.
Promotion of good governance, he said, was pivotal in providing strength for the other pillars to hold up the happiness architecture.
He said the government was committed to the principles of transparency and accountability in its conscious pursuit to establish a resilient democratic culture within, government, party, institutions and society at large.
For all these reasons he said it was important to look at human resource on a larger and complete scale.
“The focus of leaders and human resource managers ought to be to bring out the best of human nature and quality in people.”
Source: kuenselonline