Bhutan News Service (BNS), engineered informally in 2004 by a small group of Bhutanese refugee youth, has come a long way by now. The tireless dedication has enabled our team members to partially meet our goal affecting thousands of Bhutanese refugees and the Bhutanese diaspora. Reflecting back those thirteen years, we felt that a little justice has been done to the people silently suffering both inside and outside Bhutan.
This news portal has become a blessing in disguise for the public with internet access in Bhutan.
However, all the achievements and milestones we have reached have come at a great cost and sacrifice. By virtue of being in challenging circumstances and time of their life, the management and its editorial team have gone through a series of ups and downs. We are able to share this story of success due to the moral support we have received from our supporters, partners, valued readers as well as contributors like you. For the last thirteen years, we have had the privilege of working with many volunteers, reporters, writers who have made our portal rich with treasure, made precious by its value in terms of changes it engineered for our fellow Bhutanese in Bhutan. We are highly indebted to all of them.
We must state that in the beginning, our primary goal was to serve our community members with current news and stories. There weren’t many options other than the Nepalese FM radios around us. A print newspaper would not be expected to make rounds of the earth! We realized that those dramatic changes in information technology with the added blessings or curse of the social media cannot be ignored. Last year, our team was silent for a brief time; yet we were busy evaluating all these and our options to cater to the public and thus, transitioning into a new model of delivering our services, has become inevitable.
Beginning in 2018, this portal’s primary focus will be to document the success stories surfacing in the diaspora after resettlement. In the past, we, as a community, have not done a fair job of documenting the forgotten history. Our future goal is to document “oral history” of former Bhutanese refugees. We know that it takes time, efforts and a lot of financial resources to get there; but we are determined and we know that we will get there sooner than later. We’ll count on your support. Collection of “diaspora stories” is just the beginning. The site’s second priority will be to give continuity to news dissemination under the “community events” section. Aside from these, we welcome editorial contents. BNS has a vast diversity of readers and contributors from across the world. Currently, BNS has contributing articles/reports from ten different countries, including Bhutan. Since we are a non-profit, a registered entity under 501(c)(3) tax exemption status, we always welcome any forms of donations, sponsorships, and advertisements to serve quality articles to our readers. We were never perfect. We are not perfect now either. But we’ll do the best we can to serve the community we live in.
