Tuesday, August 10, 2010

One Tambon One ...

Yesterday the official government news outlet at the Public Relations Department had one article titled Govt to launch 1 Tambon 1 Temple for merit making on Sunday. While this specific program - setting up a Buddhist ceremony each Sunday in one temple of each subdistrict - is not really relevant to this blog, the title of this scheme is.

Since the One Tambon One Project (OTOP) became a success, the "One Tambon One ..." meme has been adopted for many other projects. Especially when such projects are set to be adopted nation-wide on a local level, and both in urban as well as rural areas, a catchy name for the project using this meme is almost inevitable. So I have done some searching and looked for some other project with this scheme.

Of course, the first one to note is the project where I am active a little bit as well, the One Tambon One Photo blog. It is currently dormant, but I hope it will come back to life and grow into a Thai clone of the Geograph project.

The only other project I had noticed in the news before is the One Tambon One Ricemill project - or actually One Tambon One Granary One Mill aimed at making the rice processing more local to give the local areas more of the income generated from the agriculture. Another one I crossed in Google in past is the One Tambon One Search and Rescue Team, aimed to have a local disaster response. Also One Tambon One Wife as a sarcastic term for the marriage of Thai women with foreigners I had read about before.

But that's far from all, the following I have only now found, so they probably haven't made that much impression, either because they quietly worked on the local level, or even more quietly were halted again. I have not much information about them, so I just link the page where I found them...
And I am sure those weren't all...

2 comments:

john francis lee said...

An order from the central government to the Sangha in each Jangwat to organize a counterpoint to the Red Sundays being "celebrated" now?

Since the government has demonized its political opposition people mobolize wearing red on Sundays, since red is the traditional color for Sunday, as a way of keeping their spirits up.

This seems just one more heavy-handed, authoritarian scheme to crush any political opposition to The Regime in Bangkok.

It's truly a shame that The Regime profanes Buddhism in this manner, using the state religion as yet another means of oppressing the people.

Anonymous said...

Nothing new though, is it, JFL?

Indeed, this whole decades old struggle has yet again been hijacked by hypocrites - and that their main objection to 'the Regime'is that they are now longer able to themselves "profane Buddhism in this manner, using the state religion as yet another means of oppressing the people."

A real revolution is nowhere in sight. A national turf war is about all it amounts to in its current form. The rest of us have to deal with the arrogance and greed of both sides on a daily basis.

All the sly methods of coercion (you have documented) have been practiced by every single Thai government since 1932.