Barun Roy: Hands across borders

ASIA FILE

It's not entirely fortuitous that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has chosen regional co-operation as the theme of its next annual meeting, to be held at the Cyberabad Convention Centre in Hyderabad in May 2006. Regional cooperation is a priority that the current ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda swears by and a matter that he feels is of particular relevance to South Asia.

It is his intention to bring home the message to the nations of this sub-region, particularly to India, which, as the bigger neighbour, has a central role, that it is in their interest to co-operate among themselves and if they are ready to play, ADB is more than willing to be the referee.

Will the South Asian nations respond in a positive manner? Here's ADB, for the first time, ready to put all its resources behind the idea of regional co-operation as a mainstream bank activity. President Kuroda has created a special cell directly under his supervision to pursue the idea across the region and promote projects that have a direct regional bearing.

And it's not funds alone that are on offer, but a whole lot of other things, such as help to build a common operative platform, develop institutions and capacities, bring various parties together, including non-governmental organisations and the private sector, and provide a comfort cover that everybody is satisfied with and only a third party can extend. All in all, it's a huge package that will be unfortunate not to grab.

South Asia needs ADB to hold its hand since Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation), because of the political nature of its organisation, can't be an effective third party. It's a stakeholder itself and its inadequacies are quite convincingly proven by its failure so far to move beyond its immediate political interests.

SAARC is but a sum of its members and so, will always be susceptible to their individual fears, suspicions, and biases. Only a credible and universally respected arbiter can allay these fears, suspicions, and biases and extract common agreements out of heterogeneous self-interests.

ADB's credibility as an arbiter is now well established after the universally acknowledged success of its Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) initiative. This initiative, where ADB is playing the role of both a nursemaid and a handyman, has brought together six Mekong Basin nations "" Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Viet Nam, and China, represented by its Yunnan Province "" into discussing, identifying, and initiating common projects that the sub-region needs for its economic development but can't be implemented in a co-ordinated manner by the nations on their own.

No fewer than 11 flagship programmes are now in the works and open for investment, under a 10-year strategic framework adopted in 2001, covering infrastructure, energy, trade, and tourism, among other sectors. The dynamism of development can now be clearly felt throughout GMS as old enmities are supplanted by new economic realities.

Heartened by its success, ADB has identified two other groups of nations that it believes should band together to overcome common economic problems even as their politics simmers on the back burner.

One group is Central Asia, where Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, having emerged from the shadows of the former Soviet Union, are struggling to grapple with years of underdevelopment.

These nations, along with the Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, have now been brought together by ADB under a Central Asia Regional Co-operation (CAREC) agreement for integrated and mutually beneficial development of infrastructure, trade, and policies.

To pursue these aims more vigorously, a special Central Asian unit was opened at the ADB headquarters in Manila in March 2001, and a field office was opened in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in November 2004.

The other group, of course, is South Asia, a sub-region where ADB's ambitions have progressed little beyond round-table meetings, seminars, and workshops but which it believes has a great common future to build. The sub-region, ADB points out, has a unique endowment of resources that can transform it into a leading area of economic growth. What is more, like its resources, many of its problems are also complementary and need joint efforts to mitigate them.

The north-eastern states of India are themselves a sub-region of India that has more to gain from economic co-operation with the neighbouring countries than from lack of it.

The basic elements of co-operation already exist. There's Saarc at the political level. There's the South Asia Sub-regional Economic Co-operation (SASEC) serving as a forum for economic consultation. A South Asia Growth Quadrangle has been around as a concept since 1997.

And ADB is there to support. What's needed now is a high-level political commitment to co-operation by the South Asian nations and a formal acceptance of ADB's role in it. That's what President Kuroda would be seeking at the Hyderabad meeting.