Pound foolish, penny wise

March 7, 2012Posted inHealth15 Comments
Being too cautious with small amounts of money now, could cost you a lot of money later. All of us are familiar with this universal truth. In fact, there's a well known idiom for it: penny wise, pound foolish. But what about the opposite? What if you spend a lot of money  now, and end up having to count every penny later? That would be foolish, plain and simple. No idiom is needed, and none exists, to describe such fools. The government spend more than US$ 10 million to hire McKinsey. That works out to about Nu 500 million.…

Nervous and scared

February 2, 2012Posted inEmployment20 Comments
The Class XII results are out. 8,576 students took the exams last year. And a good 86% of them passed. They’ve completed school. Some of them will go to college. Some will undergo training. And the rest will enter the world of work. They’ve begun a brand new chapter in their lives, a chapter that should be full of promise and excitement. So we should be happy for them. And we should be excited for them. But I’m not. I’m not happy. And I’m not excited. Instead, I’m nervous. And I’m scared. More than 7,300 students passed the Class…

Conflicting news

December 7, 2011Posted inEconomy5 Comments
How is it that one week the government calls McKinsey's Accelerating Bhutan's Socioeconomic Development project "A success story", and the next week the government has used our foreign currency reserves to "rescue Bhutan from rupee crisis"? Why would our economy need to be bailed out by using our hard earned foreign exchange reserves if the McKinsey project really was "...an initiative that created 14,000 new jobs in two years, helped tourist arrival cross the magical 50,000 figure, and will save the government Nu 360mn within its tenure, among numerous other benefits" ?

Saving McKinsey

May 23, 2011Posted inGovernment23 Comments
McKinsey is costing the government US$ 9.1 million. That works out to about Nu 432 million. That’s a lot of money. The government knows it. And that’s probably why the government makes it a point to tell us that the McKinsey project will bring about “savings” in excess of the US$ 9.1 million being charged by them. About two years ago, when McKinsey’s “accelerating Bhutan’s socio-economic development” project was first announced, we were told that, “The savings the government makes through this project will more than make up for the consultancy cost.” A year later, amid increasing public concern…

Where’s equity?

May 18, 2011Posted inEducation9 Comments
First, the good news: the government has granted autonomy to the Royal University of Bhutan. This means that the university can now concentrate on improving standards without the usual encumbrances of the bureaucracy. 4icu.org, a tertiary education search engine, places our university at a lowly 7,418 of the 10,000 universities they rank. Hopefully, their ranking is not accurate. Hopefully, the RUB will correct it to more accurately reflect their real ranking. And hopefully, RUB will improve on their real ranking. Naturally, a lot more is now possible – and expected – from our university.  There's a lot of work…

McKinsey poll

September 29, 2010Posted inGovernment
During the last session of the Parliament I asked the prime minister to explain what Mckinsey were doing that couldn’t be done by our own civil servants. Subsequently, I ran a poll that asked you “Are civil servants impressed with McKinsey’s work?” Of the 569 who took the poll, 408 (or 72%) replied with a emphatic “No!” while only 72 (or 12%) said “Yes!” The others (16%) answered “I don’t know.” Our poll results are straightforward: An overwhelming majority of you are not impressed with McKinsey’s performance. That is terrible, especially if, as I suspect, many of you who…

Polling McKinsey

July 13, 2010Posted inGovernment27 Comments
During question hour today, I asked the prime minister to explain what work McKinsey were doing that couldn’t be done by our own civil servants. And in my leader to the question, I’d reported that the civil servants I’d spoken with had confided that they were not impressed with the work that McKinsey had done so far. Naturally, the prime minister saw it differently. He claimed that every civil servant he’d talked to had been impressed with McKinsey’s work and had lavished praise on the world’s leading consultancy firm. Perhaps. But still, let’s conduct a poll – we haven’t…

Public business

May 20, 2010Posted inLegislature
Members of the National Assembly met last week to consider points submitted by the local governments and MNAs for inclusion in the Parliament’s 5th session. The so-called “pre-agenda” meeting is an important conduit for issues of national importance to receive the National Assembly’s attention. We must take the issues seriously as they are an important part of our responsibilities. Article 10.2 of the Constitution requires that: Parliament shall ensure that the Government safeguards the interests of the nation and fulfils the aspirations of the people through public review of policies and issues, Bills and other legislations, and scrutiny of…

Managing performance

April 14, 2010Posted inGovernment
Chapter 12 of the BCSR is dedicated to performance management. It provides a detailed prescription of how civil servants must plan, review and rate their work in order to improve productivity and accountability in the civil service. The general idea is good: it is to cultivate a performance-based culture that rewards meritocracy and professionalism. It is also intended to boost morale in the civil service. So the RCSC’s performance appraisal system should be implemented faithfully. But, we are told, it isn’t. Civil servants say that the appraisal system is not taken seriously, and that it does not work. They…

420 for McKinsey

April 9, 2010Posted inGovernment
Dasho Kinley Dorji to Kuensel, last week, defending the government’s decision to hire McKinsey: I was told that the total amount of money the government spends on consultants in a year is actually more than the amount made public. It’s about what you are getting for what you are paying. We need to define what is too expensive and too cheap. That we hire too many consultants is common knowledge. But that the government spends more for them than we are led believe is not. We should be very concerned if we suspect that the government is misleading the…

Namrita Khandelwal

March 4, 2010Posted inGovernment
Chhophyel, commenting on my previous post: “OL, I am glad that McKinsey’s proposal to liberalize tourist tariff is finally out the window.” McKinsey and Company is charging the government 9.1 million dollars in consulting fees. Add to that travel, living, per diem and other expenses, and the final tab, by some estimates, could exceed 14 million dollars! That’s a lot of money. So it’s amazing that we must feel a sense of relief every time their proposals get shot down. Their first proposal to go was about increasing annual tourist arrivals to 250,000. Then it was tourist tariff liberalization.…

Accountability matters

March 4, 2010Posted inGovernment
The government is yet to issue an official statement rescinding the prime minister’s executive order of 13 November 2009 that liberalized tourist tariffs. Meanwhile, a big majority of the people (57%) who took our poll think that the prime minister should be held accountable for trying to liberalize the tourist tariff. 26% held TCB accountable. And only 17% blamed McKinsey. I agree with the results of our poll. No matter what, if any, consultations led to the big shift in tourism policy, ultimately it was the cabinet, particularly the prime minister, who approved the tariff liberalization. And who signed…

Accountability

February 28, 2010Posted inGovernment8 Comments
The Tourism Council of Bhutan, it seems, has been made the scapegoat for spearheading the Government’s policy to liberalize tourist tariffs. Several of the people who attended last Wednesday’s meeting with the PM blamed TCB for not having consulted the stakeholders sufficiently, and for not having briefed our head of government properly. But was it really mainly TCB’s fault? Or were they, in fact, merely trying their best, as civil servants, to obey the Executive Order, signed by the PM, of their political masters of the day? And was it McKinsey who, in reality, sold the idea, directly to…

Missing incentives

February 10, 2010Posted inGovernment
Two months ago, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Information and Communication, and the Tourism Council of Bhutan signed “performance compacts” with the Prime Minister. The contracts outlined important work that the agencies would do during the next three years, and set specific targets that they would have to achieve. Some countries – India, France, Kenya, and Malaysia are examples – have used performance contracts successfully to improve the overall performance of government agencies. And any practice that improves efficiency, accountability and transparency in our government must be welcome. But for the contracts to work, the targets must…

Counting sheep

November 5, 2009Posted inMiscellaneous
A reader sent me this joke in response to my last entry about McKinsey’s recommendations on our tourism sector. A guy is driving around in his Porsche in the countryside. He stops outside a field full of sheep, walks up to the shepherd and says "I've got an offer. I'll guess how many sheep you've got in this field, and if I guess right, I get to take a sheep with me, and if I guess wrong, you get my car." Shepherd thinks he's on to a sure thing and agrees. "137" says the driver."Damn me, you're right." says…