A More Daring Bet on Bhutan’s Digital Future
Last week, the Kuensel article titled "GovTech to train 400,000 Bhutanese in digital skills by 2029" discusses Bhutan's ambitious plan to enhance digital literacy and skills among Bhutanese citizens as part of the 13th Five-Year Plan. This initiative is part of the broader National Digital Strategy (NDS), which seeks to transform Bhutan into a digitally empowered society and economy. The government has allocated Nu 10 billion for digital transformation under the 13th FYP. This includes investments in the digital economy, governance, society, and infrastructure.
While Bhutan’s plan to train 400,000 citizens in digital skills by 2029 is ambitious and well-meaning, it is fundamentally misaligned with the future we are walking into. What we need is not a digitally literate population, but a digitally literate elite. Not in the hierarchical sense, but in the sense of depth over breadth. So that Bhutanese citizens can master the tools that will shape tomorrow, not merely use them.
Because what happens after 2029? When 400,000 Bhutanese know how to make digital payments, use spreadsheets, and navigate the cyberspace, then what? What infrastructure exists to absorb them into meaningful, future-facing jobs? Will this create new industries or simply better consumers?
Similarly, this Kuensel article focuses more on the strategic objectives and budget allocations but does not specify in detail who exactly will create the 5000 digital jobs.
We are entering an era where AI can write code better than most humans. What will matter is not being trained to use them, but knowing how to make these tools, how to reason about/with them, and most importantly, how to govern them.
Instead of dispersing Nu 10 billion thinly across 400,000 people, what if we concentrated that investment toward building a world-class, elite digital workforce? What if instead of producing 400,000 digital users by 2029, we invest in building 10,000 software developers (e.g. AI engineers, full-stack developers, digital product designers, security researchers, and systems architects) by 2035?
Bhutan can become a digitally empowered nation, not by training the masses in digital hygiene, but by nurturing a small, deeply skilled, globally competitive cohort of builders.
This is not elitism. It is realism. Every industrial revolution has been driven by a few visionaries, architects, and engineers who laid the foundations that others eventually walked on. The future of education will not be about mass access to content. It will be about elite access to wisdom. The same applies to digital training. Instead of teaching people to swim in shallow waters, let’s teach a few to become deep-sea divers.
The long game matters. Ten years from now, when the world runs on autonomous agents, multimodal AI, and decentralized systems, we won’t be asking who knows how to use a government app. We’ll be asking, who in Bhutan can build the next generation of intelligence? Who can design our own LLMs? Who can build sovereign AI infrastructure that respects and represents Bhutanese values?
A country of 700,000 people cannot out-scale the rest of the world. But we can out-think. We can out-dare. We can focus.
This is not a call to cancel digital literacy programs. It’s a call to recalibrate and to think long-term. To allocate more of the Nu 10B budget toward elite fellowships, computer science scholarships, partnerships with global engineering schools, and in building local centers of excellence in software, data science, and hardware design.
Let’s not aim to train an army of users. Let’s build a guild of builders.
Sonam Pelden
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