Top US diplomat John Kerry will become the first US secretary of state to meet senior Bhutanese leaders when he visits India this weekend, a US official has said.
Kerry will hold talks with Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay from the isolated Himalayan kingdom tomorrow in the northwestern Indian city of Ahmadabad on the sidelines of a trade and investment conference.
While the United States does not have an embassy in Bhutan, the US ambassador to India is accredited to Bhutan as well.
"Secretary Kerry's meeting with Bhutanese Prime Minister Tobgay will mark the first bilateral meeting between a US Secretary of State and a Bhutanese official," a State Department official said in a statement.
"Previously, the highest ranking State Department official to engage with Bhutan was at the Undersecretary of State level. In the past, United States officials have met with both the Fourth and Fifth King of Bhutan."
Washington and Thimphu have good cooperation, but Bhutan was looking at ways to "deepen our people-to-people ties or our educational ties," another US official told reporters on a conference call.
The prime minister is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and "is quite keen to be able to provide additional opportunities for Bhutanese to be able to study in the United States."
Another important area is regional energy cooperation, the official added.
Wedged between China and India, the sparsely-populated "Land of the Thunder Dragon" only got its first television sets in 1999, at a time when less than a quarter of households had electricity.
Thanks to a massive investment in hydropower in the following decade-and-a-half, nearly every household is now hooked up to the electricity grid.
But the radical change in lifestyle has coincided with an equally dramatic transformation of the political system, with the monarchy ceding absolute power and allowing democratic elections in 2008.
With its abundant winding rivers, Bhutan has now set its sights on becoming an energy powerhouse, with most of its electric power already sold to energy-hungry India.
Three hydropower projects have been built in India-Bhutan joint ventures and another three are under construction, with plans for more.
