Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, windle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today I'm in Perra in Bhutan, and we're talking about life here generally

and governance more specifically. My guest is Sherib Tarchin, who has agreed to talk to me about

this slightly exotic and inaccessible country.

Tartan, thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

Can we talk a little bit about Bhutan itself before we get into governance issues?

It's a small country, about 700,000 people.

Yes, around like 782,000 people approximately.

And they're divided really amongst how many major city centers?

So like we have three major cities.

So it means mostly like a temple, the capital city of Bhutan.

And then down the south, we have Khonsoleng, which is bordered with the one of the happening

or the trade town between the Jai Gong in India.

And then other one,

the touristy place. So we have an international airport here in Bhutan as in Paro. So this is like

one, the major three cities that we have. But still then we have the other smaller one,

which is divided into 20 districts in total. And it's a landlocked country bordered by India and China. Yes. On the north, we have China bordered with China, and then east, west and the south is bordered with India. We can see Tibet. When you look off into the mountains on a clear day. Yeah, see, we can see like Tibet, in the sense, we can see like a mouth ranges because like Tibet and the Bhutan falls in the Himalayan range. So that's how like we can

see a part of the peaks and are in the clear and a hundred percent visibility. And the form of

government is a constitutional monarchy, but that's quite recent. Yes, the constitutional monarchy,

which is like a head by our king. And then which is like we have the democracy, which is headed by

prime minister and then the cabinet.

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