During the official inauguration of the 2020/2021 academic year at the Białystok University of Technology, a remote lecture was delivered by Dr. Andu Dukpa, President of Jigme Namgyel Engineering College of the Royal University of Bhutan, specialist in the field of electrical engineering.
Jigme Namgyel Engineering College, part of the Royal University of Bhutan, is a partner institution of the Białystok University of Technology. It is a university that offers education in the fields of engineering and management. Its main goal is to professionally prepare human resources to support the development of the country’s infrastructure in order to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. Since 2011, the unit has been headed by Dr. Andu Dukpa, who put emphasis on the development of international cooperation. The university from Bhutan is an active member of the Erasmus + program, it also carries out projects with academic centers in Canada, Japan and Nepal.
The cooperation between the Białystok University of Technology and Jigme Namgyel Engineering College has been developed since 2016. Since then, 14 students from Bhutan have studied at our university under the Erasmus + program. Lecturers also participated in the international exchange: in Białystok we hosted 11 teachers from Bhutan, 6 employees of the University of Technology took advantage of the opportunity to visit JNEC. One of the JNEC teachers obtained a master’s degree from the Faculty of Engineering Management at PB. In 2017, Bialystok University of Technology was also visited by Dr. Andu Dukpa, and the visit to the university in Buthan was made by Dr. Eng. Marta Kosior-Kazberuk, prof. PB.Bhutan is an amazing country located in the Himalayas. It has only 700,000 inhabitants. In the 1970s, the then king of Bhutan introduced a new economic model to the country – he replaced the GDP index with an index that can be translated into “Gross National Happiness”. The royal program introduced rules to help achieve social equality and increase the sense of life satisfaction among citizens, including by not agreeing to economic development at the expense of natural resources and local culture, free education and health care. The royal concept of sustainable development has also been analyzed by the world’s best economists and has influenced international politics.During his guest lecture, Dr. Andu Dukpa discussed the impact of the Gross National Happiness index on the development of higher education in Bhutan and around the world.Whether you become an engineer or doctor, farmer or politician, ultimately our main goal as a human being is happiness and prosperity. Therefore, the education we provide should help us achieve this goal: happiness and prosperity, argued Dr. Andu Dukpa.
Source : Translated from https://pb.edu.pl/2020/10/09/wyklad-inauguracyjny-dr-andu-dukpy/