The South Asian Story of Development: Opportunities and Risks: The Role of the Business Community

Abstract

I think our real challenge is to make our political processes work at something that even remotely resembles the efficacy of our technological know-how right now, in getting us connected from miles apart. Bringing together the business community of the South Asian region is one of the most promising ways forward. We have a remarkable mix of positive progress and trust, while at the same time, certain areas are experiencing stagnation. The region presents great opportunity, but also enormous risk. On the one side, we have fast economic growth, as is absolutely the case in India—one of the fastestgrowing economies in the world, an economy that has now grabbed the attention and captured the imagination of the world in a way that China had before. At the same time, several other countries in the South Asian region are also experiencing brisk economic growth. Yet what we also still see is a considerable amount of turmoil, a failure to complete peace processes in several parts of the region, and a failure to achieve the cooperation in economic enterprise within the region, with skill being divided along ethnic, or sectarian, or political lines. I am a big believer in business communities everywhere being in the lead in solving such problems. I believe that this will be true for South Asia as well. I spend most of my time on the Millennium Development Goals project in Africa, which has the highest poverty rates in the world, and where economic growth has not come in the way that it has to South Asia. But it is no secret that South Asia remains the region with the largest absolute number of people in extreme poverty. While the count is debated, it is still over 300 million people in South Asia, and there may be as many as 400 million people living in what we would call extreme poverty, meaning poverty that is so severe that life is a struggle for survival.