On September 22, Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay of Bhutan stood at the podium at the United Nations General Assembly and made a direct sales pitch to foreign investors. “I stand before you today not as a prime minister, but as a salesman,” he told world leaders, openly seeking foreign investments to advance the concept of the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC). 

For Chet Nath Timsina, Tobgay’s speech was deeply personal. Timsina was 20 when he and his family were evicted from southern Bhutan in the early 1990s after being coerced into signing a “voluntary migration form.” He resettled in New York in 2009 and has called the state home ever since. 

Living just 250 miles from the United Nations headquarters, Timsina 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. The GMC is being developed across a vast tract of southern Bhutan, a region home to large Nepali-speaking communities, including thousands of families expelled in the early 1990s. 

The Haunting Land Beneath the City

Tobgay told the U.N. that Bhutan wanted economic transformation without losing “what makes Bhutan, Bhutan.” But whose culture defines that identity? 

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 viewed such “Bhutanization” measures as attacks on their cultural identity, contributing to mass demonstrations. 

Bhutan’s government then began to force the Nepali-speaking community out of the country entirely. In 1997, the United Nations’ refugee agency reported that about 92,000 Bhutanese refugees were living in seven camps in Nepal, plus another 15,000 living outside the camps. By 2015, more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees were resettled in eight Western countries, the vast majority in the United States. 

That history matters because the GMC is being presented not merely as an investment zone but also as a model for Bhutan’s future. The project’s promotional language combines ecological preservation, Buddhist values, technology, finance, and international investment, promising economic growth alongside environmental stewardship and human well-being. 

Yet even today, Nepali remains absent from Bhutan’s southern schools. A project marketed as “mindful” development must also address the cultural rights and historical experience of the people whose homeland it is transforming. 

The issue is not whether Bhutan wants to develop the south, nor whether foreign investors are interested in a new economic hub on the Bhutan-India border. Bhutan has every sovereign right to pursue economic development. The problem is that the language of a blank slate can obscure the history of the land on which the new city is being built. 

The hard-sell to foreign investors also masks the reality of life in Bhutan today. The government continues to detain political prisoners, with international human rights organizations, alongside U.N. experts, documenting dozens of them being held for decades following unfair trials, arbitrary detention, and torture. The Global Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners in Bhutan, a community-led advocacy organization, alongside other international watchdogs, has consistently raised deep concerns regarding the inhumane treatment of these prisoners. 

Other international NGOs have also raised alarms as citizens and journalists continue to face criminal charges, fines, and jail terms under strict defamation and national security provisions for exercising freedom of expression online and offline. In recent months, The Diplomat exclusively reported how Bhutan has unjustly accepted dozens of former refugees deported from U.S. soil, only to leave them in limbo near the India-Nepal border, effectively rendering them stateless. 

It was against this backdrop that Tobgay, during his recent speech, called for “judicial independence” for the GMC.

Why Bhutan Needs the GMC

For decades, Bhutan’s economy has depended heavily on hydropower and tourism. That model generated significant revenue and helped preserve the country’s distinctive environmental and cultural policies, but it did not produce enough private-sector employment for a growing, educated population. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that youth unemployment stood at 17.8 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and identified outward emigration as a continuing structural concern. It has also warned that Bhutan needs to expand beyond hydropower and low-productivity sectors to create private-sector jobs and retain young workers.

The strain is especially visible in the growing number of young Bhutanese leaving the country in search of better opportunities. King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck even visited Australia, home to the largest Bhutanese community abroad, in October 2024. In Sydney, Canberra, and Perth, he addressed large crowds of expatriates, urging young professionals to acquire skills, save, and eventually return to help build the country’s future. 

The GMC, in part, is designed to address that same challenge by creating new economic opportunities and attracting investment that could give young Bhutanese more reasons to stay or return.

The tiny Himalayan kingdom between India and China has deep economic and strategic ties to India, particularly in hydropower and trade. GMC allows Thimphu to widen its economic relationships while preserving those longstanding partnerships. At an Indian government foreign policy panel in June, participants highlighted the GMC’s ambitions to attract international investment while emphasizing the growing role of Indian private investment. In that sense, the GMC is part of Bhutan’s effort to expand the kingdom’s strategic autonomy in a volatile region. 

The Forgotten Landowners 

However, Bhutan is attempting to attract foreign investment to a contested, grief-soaked land – where dozens of Nepali-speaking citizens were tortured and killed in uprisings and countless others died in exile without reclaiming their homes. The GMC project thus risks turning unresolved history into someone else’s investment opportunity.  

Currently based in Colorado, Hari Prashad Adhikari, a former National Assembly member from the GMC-affected area, was among thousands whose properties were seized by the regime before their eviction. In his book, “Ethnic Cleansing in Bhutan: A Stigma to 21st Century,” he recounted how his family lost their homes, farmland, and orchards. He valued his family’s lost property, business assets, and foregone income at 29.4 million Bhutanese ngultrum in 1990 prices, equivalent to roughly 204 million ngultrum (about $2.1 million at current exchange rates), using the IMF’s projected 2026 inflation rate. 

While property claims from the past remain legally and politically complex, their existence poses a tangible risk for international investors. Capital cannot flow smoothly into a state developing lands once subject to mass displacement without transparent mechanisms to address the claims of those who were forced to leave.  

Now living in Adelaide, Australia, 76-year-old Bhanu Adhikari said he spent two years in prison after being accused of violence against the government following protests in the early 1990s. For a little over two decades, he called the very land now designated for GMC his home. While he was away, he says, corrupt officials forged documents to seize his family’s seven acres of fertile land and other properties for a fabricated price of just 51,000 ngultrum, roughly $500. His mother-in-law, Beni Maya Rai, who died in Adelaide in 2025 at the age of 91, had long wished to return to her ancestral land, carrying memories of the home she had lost. 

For Adhikari, the GMC’s promise of a peaceful future cannot erase that history.

“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. 

From the Beldangi refugee camp in Jhapa, Nepal, where still close to 7,000 refugees continue to live awaiting a durable solution, Tilak Rai as the chairperson of the Bhutanese Refugee Representative Repatriation Committee (BRRRC), views the mega-project as a direct continuation of past injustices. 

Calling the GMC an attempt to purify the regime’s atrocities against the Nepali-speaking population, Rai noted that even those currently living in the affected area are denied proper compensation and silenced by 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.

Rai’s concerns from across the border are now being echoed by people who still live on the affected land in Bhutan. The landscape there is already undergoing a rapid, state-directed overhaul. Recent months have brought intensive land leveling, corporate partnership pacts and construction progress across the special administrative zone, anchored by heavy development at the Gelephu International Airport site in Samtenling, Sarpang. 

The airport will affect 552 landowners across roughly 1,400 acres, with authorities offering replacement land, tokenization, or monetary compensation. But affected residents have raised concerns over land fragmentation, the loss of land across generations, and whether they can remain in Sarpang. In an earlier expansion of the airport, 11 landowners appealed their replacement-land allocations, expressing dissatisfaction with the substitute plots. 

Meanwhile, authorities have invited proposals for a 256-unit housing project intended primarily for relocated families. The concerns are therefore not confined to those who were driven from southern Bhutan decades ago; people who remain on the land today are also confronting questions of compensation, relocation and what development will mean for their homes and livelihoods. As the airport moves toward its 2029 target, those questions remain central to the project’s transformation. 

What Investors Need to Know 

The GMC’s economic promise depends on international credibility, yet the IMF has already identified significant fiscal and financial risks associated with the project. Its independent tax regime could affect Bhutan’s national tax base, while the legal relationship between the GMC and the rest of the country still requires clarification in areas including labor, goods, and capital mobility. 

Addressing the refugee question would not require Bhutan to halt economic development in the south. Economic modernization and historical reckoning can proceed together. Bhutan could establish an accessible historical record of the southern districts affected by the displacement of the 1990s, create a transparent process for documenting property claims and determining which claims have a legal basis, and incorporate the history of the region into the GMC’s own cultural and educational institutions rather than presenting the area as an untouched landscape awaiting transformation.

The country’s leaders have invited investors to become co-founders of a new city. That invitation comes with a responsibility on both sides. Investors should ask not only what industries the GMC will create, what tax incentives it will offer, or what returns it might generate. They should also ask what kind of historical and institutional framework they are entering.

Timsina and others in the diaspora see a cruel repetition unfolding in real time: “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.”

Although neither of us originally came from the GMC-affected area, our families originally lived not that far from that region. We were children when our families were forced out of Bhutan, and we grew up in exile carrying memories of a home we barely knew. We are not arguing against development or investment in the south. But a city promoted to the world as “mindful” cannot claim a new beginning while leaving the people displaced from this land and the circumstances of their displacement outside the story.

A decade from now, the GMC may be fully operational, drawing thousands of visitors and investors, and most people may know little about the circumstances that preceded its construction. 

Many of those forced from southern Bhutan have since rebuilt their lives elsewhere and become citizens of other countries, but they still cannot return, even as visitors. Our children will grow up with memories of Bhutan that come largely from the stories we tell them, and as they grow older, they will have the opportunity to look into that history for themselves. 

Whatever the GMC becomes, the story of how this land was taken from those who once called it home will, at the very least, remain part of what we pass on to them. For investors in the project, that history may come with a cost, too.