According to a forward by a friend from a Facebook page where I am not, I am told that the National Council (NC) had also endorsed the Tourism Levy Bill of Bhutan 2022 - with the recommendation that, whether payments received or not, all tours booked and confirmed before 20th June, should be outside the purview of the Tourism Levy Bill of Bhutan 2022.
This recommendation by the NC has a hint of sanity about it – but just. It does not solve few hundred other problems that will be caused by the ill-timed implementation of the proposed Tourism Levy Bill of Bhutan 2022.
The torn and tattered Goose on death row. Like the tourism industry of Bhutan, this bird is the highest flying bird of Bhutan. I have not given up the hope that it might yet rise from the dust and begin quacking happily.
I do not believe that the National Assembly will listen to reason – they are most likely to go ahead and re-endorse the Bill - verbatim.
For the record, the manner in which they bulldozed the Tourism Levy Bill of Bhutan 2022 is proof that the NA does not function as an institution of democracy. This is amply proven by the following two brazen disregard for due process of form and procedure:
~ Some Parliamentarians, including the Opposition Leader, had required the government to validate their
reasons for this more than threefold increase in the SDF. They have been asked to justify
the mathematics behind their logic – they were required to table their research and data– on the floor
of the NA – so that the House could get a grasp of their reasoning, which would help the House arrive at an
educated decision.
This requirement remains defiantly ignored and unfulfilled.
~ The Speaker of the NA called for raising of the hands by those who supported the Finance and Economic
Committee’s recommendation for the deferment of the implementation of the Tourism Levy Bill of Bhutan
2022 to a more appropriate date. The Speaker, whether through omission or deliberately, did not require
the raising of hands by those Members who did not support the recommendations.
Friends tell me that this issue of the Tourism Levy Bill of Bhutan 2022 is a cut-and-dried issue and that I should now let it go. But I believe that it is not so – there is still a slim chance that the stabbed Goose might rise up and quack.
There are few hundred reasons I can offer why this Bill is terrible for Bhutan and its maimed tourism industry - it will take me more than a hundred pages to detail them all. I do not wish to attempt to do so at this stage. But for those of you whose cause for failure may be due to lack of institutional memory, I would like to recount a historical occurrence that few may have heard about.
It must have been during the late 1970s or early 1980s when I was still a member of the civil service. It came to pass that the UNDP had fielded a Yak Expert to undertake some studies and submit recommendations on the better management of the country’s Yak population.
When he arrived Bhutan and his counterpart in the Department of Animal Husbandry took him around the country – the expert saw a large wooly animal grazing on the mountain slopes.
He asked his counterpart: "What animal is that beautiful animal?"
The counterpart told him: "The animal is a Yak."