The Gelephu Mindfulness City is advancing across southern Bhutan, where Nepali-speaking communities were forced from their homes and residents still face questions about compensation and relocation. “The BRRRC appeals to the international community to prevent Bhutan from turning seized ancestral land into a high-tech façade designed to erase our history,” said Tilak Rai, chairperson of the Bhutanese Refugee Representative Repatriation Committee, from a refugee camp in Nepal.
At the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay pitched the project to foreign investors, bluntly describing his role: “I stand before you today not as a prime minister, but as a salesman.” His pitch concerns a large area of southern Bhutan, including land tied to displacement, property claims and unresolved demands for return.
Whose land, whose future
Chet Nath Timsina was 20 when officials evicted him and his family from southern Bhutan in the early 1990s, after coercing them into signing a “voluntary migration form.” Resettled in New York in 2009, he watched only half of Tobgay’s address. “I saw him just talk about GMC, which I feel is another way to disturb the living places of the Nepali-speaking population in Bhutan,” he said.
State measures against Nepali-speaking people preceded the displacement. In February 1989, under the “one nation, one people” policy, Bhutan removed Nepali from schools in the south. Human Rights Watch reported that ethnic Nepalis saw “Bhutanization” as an attack on their cultural identity, helping fuel mass demonstrations; the government then began forcing Nepali-speaking people out of the country. Nepali remains absent from southern schools.
The scale of exile became clear in 1997, when the United Nations’ refugee agency reported about 92,000 Bhutanese refugees in seven camps in Nepal and another 15,000 outside them. By 2015, more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees had resettled in eight Western countries, most in the United States. Many former residents have rebuilt their lives abroad, but they still can’t return, even as visitors.
Development for whom
The project is promoted as a blend of ecological preservation, Buddhist values, technology, finance and international investment. But calling the site a “blank slate” risks erasing the history of people who lived there. Land leveling, corporate partnership agreements and construction are already underway in the affected area, including work on Gelephu International Airport in Samtenling, Sarpang.
The airport will affect 552 landowners across roughly 1,400 acres. Authorities have offered replacement land, tokenization or monetary compensation, but residents have questioned fragmented plots, inheritance across generations, and whether they can stay in Sarpang. During an earlier airport expansion, 11 landowners appealed their replacement-land allocations because they disliked the substitute plots. Authorities have also invited proposals for a 256-unit housing project intended mainly for relocated families. The airport is moving toward its 2029 target, while residents still face questions about homes and livelihoods.
Bhanu Adhikari, 76, said he spent two years in prison after authorities accused him of violence against the government following protests in the early 1990s. He had lived on land now designated for GMC. He said officials forged documents while he was away, taking his family’s seven acres of fertile land and other properties for 51,000 ngultrum, roughly $500. His mother-in-law, Beni Maya Rai, died in Adelaide in 2025, still wishing to return to her ancestral land. “If foreign investors are involved in the GMC project, we will try to seek legal counsel to hold them accountable and pursue compensation for the land the Bhutanese government looted from us,” he said.
The fine print behind the sales pitch
Bhutan’s economy has depended heavily on hydropower and tourism. That model generated revenue and supported environmental and cultural policies, but it didn’t create enough private-sector jobs for a growing, educated population. The International Monetary Fund reported youth unemployment at 17.8 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and identified outward emigration as a continuing structural concern. GMC aims to attract investment and create opportunities that could encourage young Bhutanese to stay or return.
The IMF has also identified fiscal and financial risks. GMC’s independent tax regime could affect the national tax base, while its legal relationship with the rest of Bhutan still needs clarification on labor, goods and capital mobility. Meanwhile, international human rights organizations and U.N. experts have documented dozens of political prisoners held for decades after unfair trials, arbitrary detention and torture. International NGOs have raised concerns about citizens and journalists facing charges, fines and jail terms under strict defamation and national security laws. Tobgay called for “judicial independence” for GMC during his U.N. speech.
Rai said authorities denied people in the affected area proper compensation and silenced them through fear of retribution. Timsina described Tobgay’s talk of a future on the land he was evicted from as “opening an old wound that never truly healed for me and my family.” The Diplomat’s authors said they weren’t arguing against development or investment; they argued that a city presented as “mindful” shouldn’t leave displaced people and the circumstances of their displacement out of its story. The central question remains with those whose homes and claims are at stake: who gets to call this land a blank slate?