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Given the multiple crises in the West, daunting challenge of poverty at home, and the emerging needs to look towards East, paradigms of sustainable development in South Asia need to be redefined, said the speakers at the inaugural session of 14thSustainable Development Conference (SDC) ‘Re-defining Paradigms of Sustainable Development in South Asia’ organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) here on Tuesday.
The region, which hosts the half of the poor of the world, needs to redefine its approach towards poverty reduction. Its orientation towards development also needs to be redefined with greater regional cooperation and integration.
Speaking at the inaugural session as Keynote Speaker, Dr Sabina Alkire of the Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative said the measurement of poverty needs to take into account multi-faceted nature of deprivations faced by the poor. She shared the salient findings of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2011 with particular reference to South Asia, which was earlier launched by the UNDP Human Development Report Office.
According to the MPI 2011, as many as half of the population of Pakistan is poor and the country needs to adopt its national multidimensional poverty line so as to take into account the multiple deprivations in education, health and living standards that 82.7 million MPI poor face.
Syed Naveed Qamar, Minister for Water and Power, said the South Asian region has a common history and shared future, instead of embroiled with the different kinds of conflicts tormenting the lives of billion of people, we should cooperate and promote feelings of one region as it will benefit all the regional countries with regard to poverty alleviation, social development, social justice and natural resource management.
He said that the region has always followed the policy of ‘looking at the West’ for development but it missed where it wanted to go and now the time has come to adopt a policy of ‘looking at the East’ keeping in view the regional economic cooperation and neighborhood. Talking of MFN status to India and Pak-China joint initiatives he said cooperation and partnership between the countries in the region is of utmost importance which would enable us to resolve our issues and challenges.