Real Face of South Asia: One Step Forward 5 Steps Back

Real Face of South Asia
 One Step Forward 5 Steps Back

South Asia, home of almost 2 billion people is the poorest region in the world. Am sharing some extracts from a World Bank Report published 7 month back which shows trends and facts related to us. Indicators are best judge to understand ground realities yet neither our ruling classes nor international investors are concerned with these challenges.

They have some certain and fixed ideas of development. In Bangladesh or Pakistan one may use the excuse of military regimes but Indian example is the pathetic in this regard and India alone shares large chunk of poverty.

6 Mantras of development are

1.       Reliance on 20 to 30% upper & middle classes

2.       Dependence on privatization as sole solution

3.       Measuring human progress by the usage of high-tech gadgets

4.       Evaluating progress by the graphs of stock exchanges

5.       Determining strengths by foreign currency (either pound or Dollar) reserves

6.       Judging progress by growth rates

These are the mantras in fashion. But such claims evaporate in the middle whenever we check huge poor population on one hand and shortage of drinkable water & poor health services for common people.

Some extracts from the report

1.      Between 1990 and 2010, the number of people living on less than US$1.25 a day in South Asia decreased by only 18 percent, while the population grew by 42 percent.

2.      There are tremendous variations among countries in terms of access to infrastructure services. Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh have access rates that resemble the average Sub-Saharan country.

3.      It is commonly asserted that the poor have less access to infrastructure than the rich, similar to the case of private assets. In effect, a non-regressive access to infrastructure services would mean no correlation between actual access and different poverty related measures (such as households below poverty lines, and certain income and consumption levels).

4.      only 25 percent of the population has access to piped water and 24/7 water supply is a rare exception in South Asian cities

5.      Despite recent rapid growth and poverty reduction, the South Asia Region (SAR) continues to suffer from a combination of insufficient economic growth, slow urbanization, and huge infrastructure gaps that together could jeopardize future progress. It is also home to the largest pool of individuals living under the poverty line of any region, coupled with some of the fastest demographic growth rates of any region. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of people living on less than US$1.25 a day in South Asia decreased by only 18 percent, while the population grew by 42 percent.

6.      For the past two decades, SAR and East Asia and Pacific (EAP) have enjoyed similar growth rates, yet SAR lags significantly behind EAP, Latin America, and the Caribbean (LAC) when it comes to access to infrastructure services—with certain areas featuring access rates comparable only to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

7.      In SAR only 71 percent of the population enjoys the benefits of electricity access, ahead of SSA at 35 percent, but way behind the rest of the regions at above 90 percent.

8.      If South Asia hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down—or even halting—growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity—it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority.

The report addresses the issue of infrastructure Gap which means “difference between available resources and the amount of investment required to meet a country’s core infrastructural needs” But what you can expect in a situation where progress is linked with economic growth only. Ironically, “economic growth is measured as the annual percent change of gross domestic product (GDP)”. If policy makers remain relaying on above 6 mantras than gap between have and have not’s will increase

Read the report by clicking link below

http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/SAR/Reducing%20Poverty%20by%20Closing%20South%20Asia's%20Infrastructure%20Gap_Web.pdf