Bhutan's Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay told the United Nations General Assembly on September 22 that he stood before world leaders “not as a prime minister, but as a salesman.” He was pitching foreign investment in Gelephu Mindfulness City, a sprawling development in southern Bhutan. A new examination of the project says his speech left out a key fact: Nepali-speaking communities live on that land, including thousands of families expelled in the early 1990s.
In an October 5, 2026, article for The Diplomat, TP Mishra and Ramesh Gautam lay out the history behind the glossy branding. GMC is promoted as a mix of ecological preservation, Buddhist values, technology, finance and international investment, with promises of economic growth, environmental stewardship and human well-being. The authors say the project’s “blank slate” language could obscure what the land has already endured.
A Wound That Hasn't Healed
Chet Nath Timsina was 20 when authorities evicted him and his family from southern Bhutan in the early 1990s, after coercing them into signing a “voluntary migration form.” He 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. “Watching Mr. Tobgay talk about building a future on the land I was evicted from felt like opening an old wound that never truly healed for me and my family.”
The roots reach back to February 1989, when Bhutan removed Nepali from schools in the south under its “one nation, one people” policy. Human Rights Watch reported that ethnic Nepalis saw these “Bhutanization” measures as attacks on their cultural identity, contributing to mass demonstrations. Bhutan’s government then began forcing Nepali-speaking people out of the country. By 1997, the United Nations’ refugee agency counted about 92,000 Bhutanese refugees in seven camps in Nepal, with another 15,000 outside them. By 2015, more than 100,000 had resettled in eight Western countries, the vast majority in the United States. Nepali remains absent from schools in southern Bhutan.
Property Taken, Claims Unanswered
For some families, the losses were specific and enormous. Hari Prashad Adhikari, a former National Assembly member from the GMC-affected area who now lives in Colorado, saw his property seized before his eviction. In his book, “Ethnic Cleansing in Bhutan: A Stigma to 21st Century,” he recounted losing homes, farmland and orchards. He valued the lost property, business assets and foregone income at 29.4 million Bhutanese ngultrum in 1990 prices, roughly 204 million ngultrum, or about $2.1 million, using the IMF’s projected 2026 inflation rate.
Bhanu Adhikari, 76, now lives in Adelaide, Australia. He 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 for a little over two decades on land now designated for GMC. While he was away, he said, corrupt officials forged documents and took 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 at 91, 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.
Tilak Rai, chairperson of the Bhutanese Refugee Representative Repatriation Committee, spoke from the Beldangi refugee camp in Jhapa, Nepal. Close to 7,000 refugees still await a durable solution there. He called GMC a continuation of past injustices and said authorities denied proper compensation to residents in the affected area and silenced them through fear of retribution. “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,” he said.
Residents on the Land Today
People still living in the project’s path face their own uncertainty. Land leveling, corporate partnership agreements and construction are underway, including at 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. Residents worry about land fragmentation, losing land across generations and whether they can stay in Sarpang at all. During an earlier airport expansion, 11 landowners appealed their replacement-land allocations, saying they were dissatisfied with the substitute plots. Authorities have invited proposals for a 256-unit housing project meant mainly for relocated families, as the airport moves toward its 2029 target.
The Case for Development, and the Gaps
The economic argument is real. Bhutan’s economy has long leaned on hydropower and tourism. That model generated significant revenue and helped preserve distinctive environmental and cultural policies, but it didn’t create enough private-sector jobs for a growing, educated population. The International Monetary Fund put youth unemployment at 17.8 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and flagged outward emigration as a continuing structural concern. King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, visiting Australia in October 2024, urged young professionals abroad to gain skills, save and eventually return. GMC is meant, in part, to give them reasons to stay or come home. It also lets Thimphu widen its economic relationships while keeping its longstanding partnerships with India, as part of a push for strategic autonomy.
But the IMF has also identified fiscal and financial risks. GMC’s independent tax regime could affect Bhutan’s national tax base, and its legal relationship with the rest of the country still needs clarification on labor, goods and capital mobility.
The human rights backdrop is heavier still. International human rights organizations and U.N. experts have documented dozens of political prisoners held for decades after unfair trials, along with arbitrary detention and torture. Other international NGOs have raised alarms about citizens and journalists facing criminal charges, fines and jail terms under strict defamation and national security laws. The Diplomat previously reported that Bhutan accepted dozens of former refugees deported from U.S. soil, leaving them in limbo near the India-Nepal border and effectively stateless. Tobgay, for his part, called for “judicial independence” for GMC during his U.N. speech.
Mishra and Gautam don’t argue against development. Bhutan has a sovereign right to develop its south, they write. They propose a historical record of the districts affected by the 1990s displacement, a transparent process for documenting property claims and establishing their legal basis, and a place for regional history in GMC’s cultural and educational institutions. Unresolved claims, they note, could pose a risk to investors.
The authors say their own families lived near the affected area and were forced out as children. A city billed as “mindful,” they write, shouldn't leave displaced people or the circumstances of their displacement out of its story.
Why This Matters:
GMC could be fully operational a decade from now, drawing visitors and investors who may know little about what came before. Many people forced from southern Bhutan have rebuilt their lives and become citizens of other countries, yet still can't return, even as visitors. Nearly 7,000 refugees remain in camps in Nepal. Investors are being asked to back a project on land with unresolved claims, while residents still on that land ask about compensation, homes and livelihoods. Whether Bhutan builds transparent mechanisms for those claims and documents what happened will show if economic transformation can coexist with accountability. The authors write that their children will inherit memories of Bhutan through family stories, and may investigate that history as they grow older.