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Confusion about the real meaning of development started only after the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund came into being. As experts were studying the development process of the developing world, they were also surveying the performance reports of the developed world. As the western world came to be regarded as developed, having top twenty ranks on the HDI, social scientists started evaluating the conditions of life in these economies. Most of such studies concluded that life in the developed world is anything but happy. Crime, corruption, burglaries, extortion, drug trafficking, flesh trade, rape, homicide, moral degradation, sexual perversion, etc.—all kinds of the so-called vices—were thriving in the developed world. It means development had failed to deliver them happiness, peace of mind, a general well-being and a feeling of being in good state. Scholars started questioning the very efforts being made for development around the world. Most of them have suggested a need of redefining development which could deliver happiness to mankind.
Why has development not delivered happiness to the developed world? The answer to this question does not lie in any one objective fact, but touches so many areas of human life. First, whenever economists from the outset talked about progress they meant overall happiness of human life. Social scientists, somehow have been using terms such as progress, growth, development, well-being, welfare as synonyms of ‘happiness’. Happiness is a normative concept as well as a state of mind. Therefore, its idea might vary from one economy to the other.
Second, the period in which development was defined, it was considered that with the supply of some selected material resources human life can be improved. These resources were pin-pointed as, a better level of income, proper level of nutrition, healthcare facilities, proper levels of literacy and education, etc.
Happiness is a broader thing than development. The so-called ‘development’ for which the world has been striving hard for the last many decades is capable of delivering material happiness to mankind. Happiness has its non-material side also. It means, while the world has been trying to maximise its prospects of development, i.e., material happiness, it could not attend the non-material part of happiness. The non-material part of our life is rooted in ethics, religion, spiritualism and cultural values. As development or
human development was defined in material terms, it could only deliver us material happiness which is visibly available in the developed world. Due to partial definition of development, the developed world has been able to achieve development, i.e., happiness, but only of material kind. For the non- material part of happiness, we need to redefine our ‘ideas’ of development.
Somehow a very small kingdom had been able to define development in its own way, which included material as well as non-material aspects of life and named it the Gross National Happiness (GNH). This country is Bhutan.
Gross National Happiness: Bhutan, a small Himalayan kingdom and an economic non-entity, developed a new concept of assessing development in the early 1970s—the Gross National Happiness (GNH). Without rejecting the idea of human development propounded by UNDP, the kingdom has been officially following the targets set by the GNH. Bhutan has been following the GNH since 1972 which has the following parameters to attain happiness/development:
(i) Higher real per capita income
(ii) Good governance
(iii) Environmental protection
(iv) Cultural promotion (i.e., inculcation of ethical and spiritual values in life without which, it says, progress may become a curse rather than a blessing)
At the level of real per capita income, the GNH and the HDI are the same. Though the HDI is silent on the issue of ‘good governance’, today it should be considered as being promoted around the world once the World Bank came with its report on it in 1995 and enforced it upon the member states. On the issue of protecting environment, though the HDI didn’t say anything directly, the World Bank and the UNO had already accepted the immediacy of sustainable development by then and by early 1990s there was a seperate UN Convention on the matter (follow up on this convention has been really very low till date which is a different issue).
It means the basic difference between the GNH and the HDI looks at the level of assimilating the ethical and spiritual aspects into our (UNDP’s) idea of development.
An impartial analysis sufficiently suggests that material achievements are unable to deliver us happiness devoid of some ethics at its base. And ethics are rooted in the religious and spiritual texts. But the new world is guided by its own scientific and secular interpretation of life and the world has always been suspicious about recognising the spiritual factor in human life. Rather the western idea of secularism was defined after rejecting the very existence of anything like God and also rejecting the whole traditional hypothesis of spiritualism as instances of ignorance and orthodoxy. And there should not be any doubt in accepting it that the western ideology in the name of development has ultimately, dominated the modern world and its way of life. The idea of development which was followed by a large part of the world has been cent per cent ‘this-worldly’. And anybody can assess today what kind of happiness the world has been able to achieve in the end.
A recent study by a senior economist from the UNDP on the Bhutanese development experience under the GNH has vindicated the idea of ‘gross happiness’ which development must result into. As per the study, the period 1984–98 has been spectacular in terms of development with life expectancy increasing by a hopping 19 years, gross school enrolment reaching 72 per cent and literacy touching 47.5 per cent (from just 17 per cent).7
After the terror attack on the World Trade Centre in the USA the whole world has gone for a psychic metamorphosis and at least the euphoria of development from this world to that world has been shaken from its very base. The world which is in the process of globalisation at one hand has started introspecting whether multicultural co-existence is possible. The Human Development Report of 2004 was titled as Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World. We may conclude that mankind is passing through a phase of serious introspection and transition where the dominant view in the world may metamorphose into redefining the very idea of development by including ethical values and spiritualism as important parts. But till now the proponents of development look a bit shy in believing and accepting whole- heartedly that there exists a non-material part of life, which needs to be realised to make our development result into happiness.