The Bhutan We Think We Know

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The numbers

Data

Charts and figures drawn from public sources — Royal Monetary Authority, the National Statistics Bureau, ministerial budget reports, multilateral country desks. 25 published so far. Each one is a static SVG, free to share — each chart has its own URL.

  1. Paradox #1 The diesel-subsidy gap, March–May 2026
  2. Paradox #1 Bhutan's net energy ledger with India
  3. Paradox #3 Eighteen years and counting — Punatsangchhu-I versus the rest
  4. Paradox #7 From USD 505M to USD 2.11B in thirty months
  5. Paradox #13 The Australian diaspora — five-fold in eight years
  6. Paradox #14 From 6.4 to 1.4 — the fastest fertility transition in South Asia
  7. Paradox #16 From 35 percent to 73 percent in twenty-four years
  8. Paradox #18 One in every 9.5 working Bhutanese is in the civil service
  9. Paradox #14 Nine in ten Bhutanese have no formal pension
  10. Paradox #22 The country employs more monks than bankers
  11. Paradox #26 How big is the Gelephu Mindfulness City?
  12. Paradox #18 The state grows as the cohort shrinks
  13. Paradox #16 Up the index, down the culture
  14. Paradox #40 Nu 8 billion hiding in one project
  15. Paradox #41 An anti-corruption commission, mostly handling accountability complaints
  16. Paradox #18 Where the four out of five graduates go
  17. Paradox #13 77,000 Bhutanese abroad — composition across 112 countries
  18. Paradox #13 Six months in Thimphu, one week in Brisbane
  19. Paradox #51 Doubled for 99.96%, untouched for 23
  20. Paradox #56 Bhutan's industrial electricity is the third-cheapest in the world
  21. Paradox #51 The four structural leaks — USD 375M a year
  22. Paradox #10 Three thousand wrote the policy, fifteen brought the tourists
  23. Paradox #1 Three diesel prices for the same litre
  24. Paradox #1 Nu 1.45 billion the household never sees
  25. Paradox #1 What Nu 5 billion of fuel subsidy could buy instead