Peole in Bhutan are enjoying a level of happiness that is greater than what they experienced five years ago.

This happy news was revealed in a new survey of social wellbeing released by Bhutan.

Among other things, the survey measured whether the people of Bhutan are getting enough sleep.

The predominantly Buddhist country wedged between China and India launched the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index in 2010 to include indicators ignored by conventional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the monetary value of all goods and services produced in a country.

The GNH ranges from quality-of-life indicators like leisure time and forest cover to whether people experience negative emotions like anger and envy.

Addressing a conference on GNH in Bhutan's capital Thimphu on 3 November, Prime Minister Lyonchoen Tshering Tobgay said the index had inched up to 0.756 this year from 0.743 in 2010, an increase of 1.71 per cent.

However, he said, he was as yet unaware of what a good growth rate was. The constitutional monarchy's goal is for every citizen to be "extensively or deeply happy".

 "We saw some modest gains in areas such as living standards, health and time use," said Tobgay, according to a copy of his speech, adding that 7 per cent more Bhutanese got enough sleep in 2015 than in 2010. "But in other areas such as community vitality and psychological wellbeing indicators, we actually seem to have lost ground."

The World Bank data from 2006 to 2014 said the gross national income of Bhutan, which until the 1960s was an isolated rural society with no currency, telephones, schools, hospitals or public services, has been consistently higher than that of South Asia as a whole.

But Rajesh Kharat, who teaches South Asian studies at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and advises the government of Bhutan, says the GNH's benefits have been confined to towns where communication is better.

"The main thing is education. Most of the people in rural areas have not really understood whether Bhutan is a monarchy or a democracy," he said.

Tobgay, too, said he was troubled that the improvement in GNH was strongest in towns instead of "our fields and valleys and hamlets high up in the mist", a worrying sign for the landlocked country. More than half of Bhutan's 3.49 lakh labour force still works in agriculture.

"We must find ways of energising GNH in rural areas, so young people build their careers and families in our beautiful villages as mature modern men and women, and don't only yearn for the city lights," said Tobgay.

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