Poverty Alleviation and SAARC Social Charter Perspective and Issues in Regional Cooperation

Prof. Bishwa Keshar Maskay
April 1, 2003

1. Introduction

The Charter of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) aims to achieve its objectives of social justice and economic prosperity through mutual understanding, good neighbourly relations and meaningful cooperation in the region as well as seeks national and collective self-reliance by promoting people-to-people understanding at the regional level. To tackle the common challenges of growing population, inequality, environmental degradation and chronic poverty as well as to prevent the continuous marginalization of the region from the world market it highlights the benefits of cooperation.

The SAARC Charter spells out eight specific objectives, the prominent ones of which are: promoting the welfare of the people; improving their quality of life though accelerated economic, social, and cultural development; providing all individuals opportunity to live in dignity and to realize their full potential;. shaping collective self-reliance, collaboration and mutual assistance in various fields, including the development of their common position in international organizations.

The economic order sought for by the South Asian Governments, however, could not be established until the beginning of the eighties. Unlike the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), absence of acceptable political understanding, lack of a regional institutional framework, persistence of ancient suspicions and rivalries, and conflicts between India and its neighbors, in particular, prevented the evolution of a strong political will for economic cooperation. Thus, in the initial stage of SAARC, its strategic option was only muddled about - allowing tremendous scope for debates, but limiting the actual capacity to allocate goods and services, values and institutions. But, after eleven consecutive summits in the various capitals of member states, the scope and the level of its activities in functional, issue-specific and institutional areas have considerably increased.

The democratization of most of the South Asian states has created a new environment where the rise of non-state actors engaged in activities within and across national boundaries is creating new opportunities. Their demands for a space in policy making and +the redistribution of resources, statuses, and identities are accelerating. The scarcities of resources, the tendencies toward ethnic, linguistic, socio-cultural and regional loyalties, and the forces of interdependence are becoming global in scope. These aspects are not only the crucial causes of regional imbalanced economies but a consequence of the biased nature of global political economy that prescribes structural adjustment for the South Asian countries rather than offering new economic opportunities to them. Adjustment is less easy politically because of the weak national consensus on this policy. Implementation of structural adjustment program was very costly for the majority of poor nations. A balance must be struck between economic and social development whereby economic growth balances out human and social rights of the poor. SAARC countries are going full scale to realize its economic objectives through South Asian Preferential Trading Agreement (SAPTA) and the processes are set to achieve South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) by 2010. It also aims to establish a South Asian Custom Union (SACU) by 2015 and South Asian Economic Union (SAEU) by 2020. In this context Social Charter is essential to increase the productivity of entire population and decrease the marginalization of those in the regionalization and globalization of political economy.

The growth potential of South Asia remains underdeveloped, given the abundance of natural resources, modest level of manpower, and the scope for technological innovation and investment. However, the future of SAARC is contingent on its steady economic as opposed to political evolution; for the basic condition of human life (social, psychological, and political, etc) is being governed by the economic status of society. Poverty, inequality, and illiteracy stem mostly from the lack of economic opportunities.

Modernization of economies requires technical and professional manpower, institutional and policy reforms to creatively cope with the globalization process. Learning and absorption capacities are directly correlated to the modernization of agricultural, industrial, service and informational sectors. The market mechanism alone would be ineffective to augment welfare rolls or to provide right incentives. Although the SAARC countries adopted an adjustment policy that took into account macro-economic growth, the importance of reducing poverty, raising the aggregate income level and its distribution, providing employment, education and participation in the market and instituting a sound political process, the achievements made on these fronts have remained so far below the expectation. For realizing the goal of what the Report of the Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation calls Daal-Bhaat, or basic needs, calls for a radical change in the development paradigm anchored on the theory of the "trickle-down effect" is necessary. The new perspective on development in the region requires a modest shift from the state-centric, centralized and urban-industrialization model to a model that is pro-people, participatory, decentralized and sustainable. A major shift has become imperative because South Asia has the largest concentration of the world's poor, accounting for more than 46 percent of the total number of poor in the developing world who are caught in slow growth, tattered social fabrics and crumbling political process. Evidently, the leitmotif of Social Charter here means nothing less than uplifting the lives of the poor.

This paper primarily examines how a South Asian Social Charter could give coherent expression and commitment to poverty alleviation and provide a framework for unified efforts within a collective frame of social values and norms. The paper attempts to capture the collective vision underlined in the SAARC Charter and to synthesize several efforts which are relevant to give meaning to the South Asian Social Charter. This paper, however, does not compare the draft of SAARC Social Charter with those of others because others deal with the rights of workers while the SAARC's one is close to social development.

2. SAARC Initiatives on Social Issues

The draft of SAARC Social Charter mentions the need for enhancing coherent social priorities, policies and programs and the qualities of living conditions of South Asian peoples. All the SAARC Summit declarations have consistently focused on the social dimensions of national and regional development. They provide a substantial base for defining the main elements of a Social Charter.

From the 1991 Colombo Summit onwards, the social issues are more clearly identified and addressed under separate headings. The Dhaka declaration (1993) has added women in development and youth; the Delhi declaration (1995) has included the problems disability and illiteracy, the need for people-to-people contact. Implicit in all these commitments is the recognition that the different elements of social development are closely interlinked, so the strategies to deal with them must necessarily be integrated, with each strategy supporting the others in a virtuous cycle. In the 1987 Summit (Pakistan), the leaders articulated the basic elements for sustainable human development in terms of "eradication of poverty, hunger, disease illiteracy, unemployment and environmental degradation".

Ministerial meetings and regional initiatives have followed these declarations. For many of the social goals, countries have set targets and resolved to achieve them within a clearly defined time frame. The most specific of these resolutions was that of the Ministerial Conference on Children in Rawalpindi in 1996 which agreed on two set of targets covering mortality, fertility, education, nutrition, health, water, sanitation and gender quality - one set of targets to be achieved by 2000, and the other set by 2010. The focus on children and the girl child in particular is perhaps the strongest and most positive feature of SAARC's concern for social development. The priority given to children's development and welfare evokes the deepest motivations for sustainable human development. We see children as the human bridge between what the community actually is and what it aspires to be. This suggests that the challenge is to link public policy precisely with family and community behavior in support of children.

3. SAARC's Initiatives on Poverty Alleviation

At the Colombo SAARC Summit in 1991, the Heads of State or Government of the SAARC countries passed the resolution that an Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation be set up, with TOR defined as: to examine causes and consequences of poverty in South Asia; to disseminate positive lessons from successful and sustainable experiences in the region; to diagnose causes of past failures; and to identify critical, concrete and practical elements of a coherent strategy for poverty alleviation. The Commission was to be represented by eminent persons from each SAARC member state and report its recommendations to the Seventh Summit.

This Summit came up with a bold resolution for fighting poverty in the region through collective cooperation, and to this end, recommended to identify important areas wherein such cooperation could be possible. The leaders realized the importance of regional cooperation and the immense gains attainable through collective actions as exemplified by cases of regional cooperation in North America, Europe and East Asia. They visualized that similar regional venture is possible in South Asia for reasons of the regions having the sheer market strength of over one billion consumers and shared bonds of culture, history, economies and ecology.

The Summit also envisaged that a significant portion of poverty-stricken population would be relieved from the grip of the problem through development attained with collective effort, leaving thus only a small portion of such people, who could be served with safety net measures and other regular types of relief measures in the short run. This residual population also could be brought into the mainstream of development in the long run, if it is provided with micro-credit, education and skill development facilities. For this to happen, the Summit stressed, each member nation should accord topmost priority to poverty alleviation in its national development plans.

The Summit also noted that there are a number of successful experiments on poverty alleviation carried out in the South Asian Region. Some of these experiments are assessed as viable models for replication in other nations. Apart from this, the South Asian GNP per capita rose to 3.1 percent per year during the 1980s as against the trends in Latin America, Middle East and Africa.

However, it can be stated that, despite these achievements, the South Asian governments, in general, have failed to make a significant achievement in the direction of cutting down the high incidence of poverty in the region. One of the major reasons is that the leaders have underestimated the magnitude and complexity of the problem that poverty entails. A staggering number of 440 million people are living under conditions of absolute poverty in the South Asian region.

To combat poverty, the Colombo Summit has come up with a two-pronged strategy. The first prong represents the conceptual and operational dimensions, which are fairly understood. It includes economic liberalization and structural adjustment, aiming to transform the economy into an export-oriented, internationally competitive model. The second prong which is still perplexing is that of poverty alleviation. The confusion is due to the fact that liberalization programs, when taken alone, are generally found to end up in benefiting only small segments of the better off population, leaving the poor worse off, particularly in the shorter term. In the view of this situation, what is needed is to give unfaltering priority to the poverty alleviation thrust.

4. Observations and Recommendations of Independent SAARC Commission on Poverty Alleviation

The said Commission was formed. A few of the several observations of this Commissions are as follows:

• The conventional development interventions over the past fifty years have resulted in a growth rate too low to exert impact on the levels of living and human development of the large number of people. Such growth has failed to "trickle down" except to a limited extent. The magnitude of poverty remains unacceptably high.
  
  
• Excessive dependence on the State for every lead in development has curtailed initiatives on the part of the people. Obsessive preoccupation with capital accumulation as the driving force in economic growth neglected the capacity of the poor to make progress. Concentration on industrialization/modernization as the dominant paradigm of development has resulted creating duality within the system, thus widening gaps between rural and urban levels of living as well as in further polarizing within these areas. The poor faced the worst consequences of these "manufactured" processes.
  
  
• Mere continuation of the conventional development pattern with marginal variations, increasing inefficiency in achieving even the limited gains and ad hoc consultation with the poor in the name of participation would be too inadequate to reverse the process of poverty reproduction. The eradication of poverty in South Asia would require a major political approach in which participation of the poor plays a decisive role.
  
  
• For poverty alleviation the poor people need to be empowered and indispensably linked to the mainstream of development. Each South Asian country has had significant success cases of this approach to poverty alleviation.
  
  
• For empowering the poor, the nutritional standards approach (the Daal-Bhaat approach) toward the satisfaction of basic needs of the South Asian poor becomes imperative.
  
  
• It is imperative that primary education be made available to all children of school age (6-14) since universal primary education is a powerful instrument of development. The SAARC leaders agreed to share their respective experiences and technical expertise to achieve this goal.
  
  
• The solution to the poverty problem requires a politically directed approach based on the lessons of past experiences, lessons from successful grassroots initiatives, and the proven facts of macro-level successes. The rationale behind taking the political approach is that poverty eradication is a deeply political objective, not achievable through purely technocratic means alone. Rather, a more coherent, practical and concrete approach within a democratic political system is necessary, an approach that offers plenty of scope for participation, that is pluralistic in process, and that offers adequate opportunities for women and other disadvantaged group to participate in nation-building tasks.
  
  
• Poor women can effectively overcome their double burden through the same process.
  
  
• There is the need for sensitive support mechanisms to catalyze the process of social mobilization. A new kind of animator/facilitator who is identified with the poor and committed to poverty alleviation needs to be a part of these support mechanisms.
  
  
• Participatory monitoring and evaluation have to be built into the process so that self-corrective action can take place as the process evolves.

The Commission's analysis of the past paradigms of development implemented in the region goes to depict the hollowness and irrelevance of these paradigms in terms of addressing the existing needs of the poor. Obviously, the Commission has used powerful language in both its analysis of the conditions of the poor as well as in its prescription - a language normally found in the writings of activists, not in the documents of planning technocrats who were represented in the Commission.

Further, "building organization of the poor" for the "empowerment of the poor" -- to reproduce the Commission's expressions -- cannot take place under conventional styles of management and governance of public affairs. If they occur, they will come only through conscientisation, enfranchisement, enablement of the poor and through their own organizational efforts. Explicit in the Commission's analysis and prescription is the historic compulsion to treat the poor as a critical actor in the equation of human development. Nepal is a founder member of the SAARC. So, the Commission's line of thinking and the prescription have immense relevance to the issues of poverty alleviation in Nepal. If one borrows the insights from the theories on NGO movement, what the Commission has recommended is the 'empowered participation' of the poor in the entire phases of development undertakings - from beginning to end.

The Commission was convinced that the poor have been unable to overcome their conditions of poverty not for lack of initiative or knowledge on their part but mostly for reason of the existence of institutionalized obstacles against their empowerment and participation. To overcome these systemic obstacles requires both releasing the creative energies of the poor themselves as well as opening a lead role for the State to champion the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Even the remote-looking goal such as social equality and social equity can be achieved gradually through this approach. This approach has the added advantage of leading the governments to adopt a consistent and coherent strategy rather than experiment with the "shopping list" of panaceas.

However, the poverty eradication thrust would need to be harmonized, in a step-by-step manner, with the longer-term strategy of an open economy-industrialization approach, as both prongs, when infused into a new overall pattern of development, would evolve and mature in the South Asian context.

5. The SAARC'S Proposed Social Charter

The Group of Eminent Persons constituted by the Ninth Summit (Male, 1997) had formulated the broad objectives and social agenda for mutual cooperation between the SAARC nations, and also developed a detailed action plan in specific areas. This event may be said to have articulated the idea of formulating a Social Charter for the SAARC region. The Tenth Summit (Colombo, 1999) had reiterated similar idea in terms of defining regional dimensions in the social sector that go well beyond the national plan of action. The Eleventh Summit (Kathmandu, 2002) finally declared that a SAARC Social Charter be formulated at the earliest. The Council of Ministers was entrusted with the responsibility of working out the framework of the proposed Social Charter. Evidently, the genes of the SAARC Social Charter were present in the several resolutions passed by the SAARC leaders from time to time.

It was time to consolidate the multifarious resolutions of the SAARC Summits into a single document on social sector development, which would help determine social priorities and formulate policies and programs in coherent and complimentary ways. The plans of action developed on basis of so formulated Social Charter would lead to improved efficiency in the utilization of resources (national, regional and external), to sustainability of development programs -- all with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of living conditions of the targeted beneficiaries, the poor people of South Asia. The preliminary text of a working draft on Social Charter prepared in 2002 underlines to seek equitable growth through the promotion of the status of women, promotion of the interests and well-being of children, population stabilization, poverty alleviation, and drug de-addiction, rehabilitation and reintegration.

The SAARC leaders agreed to incorporate in the proposed Social Charter the following major goals:

• to recognize social development of the people as a prime national responsibility;
• to integrate economic, cultural and social policies in direction that they reinforce each other, and, to that end, recognize the interdependence of the public and private sectors of development activities;
• to promote participatory governance, human dignity, social justice and solidarity at the national, regional and international levels and ensure tolerance, non-violence, pluralism and non-discrimination in full respect of the diversities within and among societies;
• to promote respect for and observance and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all;
• to promote equality and equity between men and women and the welfare and interest of children and youth;
• to promote social integration and strengthen the civil society;
• to empower people, particularly women, for building up their capacities;
• to promote full participation of concerned beneficiaries at all stages of development schemes; and
• to harness new information technologies and productivity raising technologies for improving the living conditions of the poor people.

5.1 Importance of the Social Charter

The manifold development directives articulated in the proposed Social Charter clearly reflect the SAARC leaders' deep concern to give the development initiatives a human touch with unprecedented stress on improving the living conditions of the teeming millions of the South Asian poor. Reflected in the Charter are five ingredient principles of human well-being: (a) enlightenment (access to education), (b) enablement (capacity building), (c) enfranchisement (embracing all sectors of the society, (d) empowerment (promotion of participation opportunities to people to make decisions that affect them), and (e) entitlement (observance and protection of human rights and all fundamental freedoms). These ingredients of human development go to make the Social Charter as great as a Human Charter, to and make it correspond with the Millennium goals of the UN, and to with the goals formulated in other international conventions. If the spirit of humanness so well reflected in the proposed Social Charter is translated into designing and implementing programs and actions of development in literal sense, the battle against poverty and miseries in the South Asian regions will and can be won.

The Nation-States under the umbrella of the SAARC have so far been launching development programs each in its own ways and assessing also its performance in its own way. The Social Charter goals now impinge on each nation to move toward the regional goals and make assessment of their performance also against the regional standards. As can be conceived, the external assistance may help improve the development content and implementation modality, ushering in in the South Asian region newer paradigms of planning, implementations and evaluation.

With the roles and rights of different stakeholders of development clearly defined, the Social Charter would assume the form of a social contract between the State and its citizens. With the strengthening of civil society and with the empowerment of the people so long deprived of playing their legitimate potential roles, the whole of society will serve as custodians of the Charter, not merely the State.

5.2 Some Imperatives

The SAARC Social Charter represents the culmination of declarations made by the Heads of State and Government of the SAARC region. Declarations as such represent only pious intentions, they ought to be translated into concrete action plans to be pursued by each member state either in coalition or within the national context. In giving the Social Charter a final shape and substance that can guide the development of such plans of action, attention needs to be given to the following considerations:

1. The South Asian Charter needs to comply with the realities of the South Asian context and to the possibilities of attaining certain goal by a certain time.
   
   
2. The Charter needs to be of standard quality comparable with the standard of the declarations made in major international summits or conferences taken place during the 1990s, namely the World Summit on Children's Rights (New York, 2000), the Beijing Conference on Women (1996), the World Social Summit (Copenhagen, 1995), and the World Food Summit (Rome, 1996).
   
   
3. As there are differences on many aspects across the South Asian nations, particularly with respect to economy, stage of development, availability of resources and institutional capability, it is also an imperative that each SAARC nations identifies its own issues and problems of development, draws up the action plans to address the structural, cultural and institutional barriers to poverty alleviation, and takes effective collective action.
   
   
4. As such, the time frame for attaining the different development goals agreed upon collectively by the SAARC nations must be scheduled in consideration of the status, capability and resources of individual SAARC nation. The important issue is not the attainment of certain goal by a common deadline, but the sustenance of strategic actions toward achieving significant progress in all directions to capture the development synergy.
   
   
5. In the zeal of going collectively, one should never ignore the awful disparities within each SAARC Nation-State. As such, macro-level yardsticks to compare the progress made in the social development sector in the SAARC nations may fail to capture the substantive progress made in reducing the intra-nation disparities. Macro-level comparisons are necessary to some extent and on only selected aspects but never to the extent of ignoring the realities of intra-level disparities. Therefore, the major criterion of measuring/assessing the progress made should be to look into the extent of reduction of the disparities within each member State. For example, what has happened to the core group of the disadvantaged and the deprived sections of the population as a result of interventions founded on the SAARC initiatives, should govern the assessment exercise.
   
   
6. Considering the scale and intensity of the poverty problem in the South Asian region, it is unlikely that certain poverty alleviation programs declared by the Rawalpindi Summit (1996) targeted to be achieved by 2010 or even by 2020 may look ambitious. As a matter of principle, a Social Charter must necessarily be inspired by long-term vision, say 40 or even 50 years, and go by strategic phases of 10 years' interval.
   
   
7. When all said about the desirable imperative steps that ought to go into the blueprint and the modus operandi of the Social Charter, it must be emphasized that the human values and aspirations so well reflected in the summit declaration should not be by-passed in the spirit of going into "regional" ways - rigid "regionalism" is as bad as blind "nationalism" both as a political principle and a culture of practice.

5.3 Form and Structure of the Social Charter

The envisaged Social Charter for the SAARC region has to incorporate some important elements: set of directive principles, strategic objective and targets, major policies and programs. These elements may be used as a frame of reference in formulating plans of action encompassing the reform measures the SAARC nations have already been implementing in their respective nation in response to international mandates which they have ratified. These include several conventions such as: Drug Abuse, and Trafficking of Children and Women, Human Resource Development, Food Security, Poverty Monitoring, Girl Child, SADF, Disabled, etc.

Regarding the process of finalizing the SAARC Social Charter, attention should be given to three considerations:

1. The formulation of the national Charter of the SAARC Social Charter must be based on the broadest participation of all concerned - national planners, political parties, members of civil society, administrators and managers of the concerned sectors of political economy. Such participatory process is necessary to meet two ends: (a) to ensure national willingness to participate in the regional endeavor, and (b) to provide legitimacy to the national chapter founded on popular will. Such a participatory process can even curb the likehood of treating joint venture undertakings simply as "closed" bureaucratic exercises at the inter-governmental level. In one of the SAARC Summit in the future, reports of the national as well as the regional synthesis of these reports need to be presented for consideration and adoption by the SAARC leaders.
   
   
2. A few suggestions are presented on matters related to the framework for regional cooperation. The framework needs to be made clear about:
   1. What regional support will be made available to the member states on matter of institution building?
   2. How much resource will be made available to member states to carry out the regional plans of actions, especially to those states that have inadequate resources at their disposal?
   3. Who will be charged with the task of carrying out R&D activities -- a committee of experts outside SAARC or a committee of experts pooled together form the member states?
   4. Likewise, who will do the task of monitoring the scale and impact of the implementation of the regional schemes of social development?
   
   
3. In the same vein, it can be suggested that similar considerations need to be given to matters of building up national institutions of development, mobilization of resources for implementation of the plans and programs under the Nation-States, R&D activities, and monitoring of the process of implementation of plans and programs regarding poverty alleviation, employment generation, social integration and, consequently, realization of the rights, entitlements and social opportunities for people of diverse origins.

6. Conclusions

Sustainable economic and political cooperation requires strong social foundation and societal legitimacy. The development of the cooperate mechanism in South Asia through the SAARC enables the regional states to utilize efficiently the scarce regional resources for their long-term benefit. This is because such development is based on rational cost-benefit calculation where the cost of non-cooperation is far greater than that of cooperation. Benefits of cooperation tend to minimize the political consideration of resource allocation -- thus establishing the role of government and non-government actors as facilitator in infrastructure-creation and maintenance as well as sustainability of development. It is only in cooperative institutions that people offer labor, resources and other services and nurture economic and social integration. This means that legislative power of the regional people needs to be enhanced for purposes of evolving institution management rules, monitoring compliance, and enforcing sanctions, thus making the whole development process sustainable. Only through sustainable social development, people can control regional markets, not just by regulating price but basically addressing issues of quality, innovation and management of goods and services. Such measures give ample space for civil society to organize and work for collective action. There are several social areas where the primary interests of South Asian people converge.

The growing interdependence within South Asian states and the rest of the world is a matter of stark necessity rather than a matter of choice. SAARC embodies a common framework of development goals for member nations and implementation of common policies directed at poverty alleviation, improvement of quality of life, and social justice. The increasing realization of common commitment to non-offensive defense and conflict-resolution at the national and regional levels is expected to generate energy for addressing the common challenges of poverty, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement. Clearly, cooperative development cannot move in the absence of participatory regional processes where regional governments at the apex and people at the bottom marshal their resources and maintain their confidence in the SAARC's Charter. Fellowship can be derived from intimacy in cooperative behavior, rather that in obsolete hegemonies, in sharing of common wealth of the region for collective self-reliance, so necessary to attain sustain development and sustain it in a world seeking Continental identity and existence.

When all said about SAARC, a final observation could be that the proposed SAARC Social Charter can be treated as an epic document to be formulated by the Asian people for the well-being of the Asian people, provided that three things go with the Charter. First the finalization of the Charter must reflect the common aspirations of the Asian people. Second, concrete programs of development need to be blueprinted best suited to the stage of development of each member country. Third, the member nations must be held accountable to both their respective people in particular and sensitive to the South Asian community. Doing things regionally naturally differs from doing things nationally. The SAARC leaders must necessarily define the terms and conditions of disciplining themselves to attempt doing as committed to the sense of brotherhood of nations. If these things are not attended, the Charter, will for sure, be treated as "utopian" dreams so recurrently visiting in the great documents of mankind.

Notes

1. H. Zaki, "An Overview of the Recent Developments in SAARC" Keynote Address made at a regional seminar on "South Asia: the Roads Ahead" organized by CGSSAP in cooperation with Friendrich Ebert Stiftung on November 16, 1993.
   
   
2. The idea of regional cooperation in South Asia was first made by president Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh in May 1980. Then the "Proposal for Regional Cooperation in South Asia" was circulated by his country in November. The modus operandi for this was streamlined in 1981 by the foreign ministers of regional countries. In August 1983 the IPA was launched through the adoption of the declaration on South Asian Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The first summit in Dhaka in December 1985 declared the establishment of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Following this other summits were held in India (1986), Nepal (1987), Pakistan (1988), the Maldives (1990), SriLanka (1991), Bangladesh (1993), India (1995), Male (1997), Colombo (1998) and Kathmandu (2002).
   
   
3. Anuwar Ali, "Economic Transformation and its Implications for Interdependence and Competitiveness: Southeast Asian Perspectives". Paper presented at "Economic Transformation in Asian and the Pacific: Social, Political, and Ecological Perspectives, APIDA Tenth General Meeting 5-8 October 1993; Colombo, Sri Lanka and S.S. Colombage, Payments and Monetary Cooperation (Colombo: FES-CGSSAP, 1994).
   
   
4. Data for this article are mainly taken from the Human Development Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, and Meeting the Challenge, SAARC Secretariat 1992. The Approach to the Formulation and Adoption of a Social Charter for the SAARC Region, Marga Institute, Sri Lanka, 1999, Social Charter (SAARC Preliminary Text of a Working Draft, and Declaration of the Eleventeeth SAARC Summit.
   
   
5. An in-depth analysis made of the participatory process at the micro terrain such as Women's Development Program (WDP) in India, the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP) in Pakistan, the Small Farmers' Development Program (SFDP) in Nepal, the Mongar Primary Health Care Program (MPHP) in Bhutan, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in Bangladesh, and the Janashakti Banku Sangam (JBS) in Sri Lanka, as well as other cases such as the Working Women's Forum (WWF) and Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India, the Production Credit for Rural Women (PCRW) in Nepal, the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Pakistan, and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh reflect the kind of social mobilization taking place where the poor have contributed to growth and human development simultaneously under varying sociopolitical circumstances.

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