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
14th Sustainable Development Conference (SDC) ‘Re-defining Paradigms of
Sustainable Development in South Asia’ organised by Sustainable Development
Policy Institute (SDPI) on Tuesday. The region, which hosts half of the global
poor population, needs to redefine its approach towards poverty reduction. Its
orientation towards development also needs to be redefined with greater
regional cooperation and integration.
Syed Naveed Qamar, Minister for Water and Power, said South Asian region has a
common history and a 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 regards 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 neighbourhood. Talking of Most Favored Nation (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.
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, while sharing the salient findings of the
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2011 with particular reference to South
Asia, said 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.
Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Executive Director on the global current crisis
involving economic, social, political, environmental dimensions said prevalent
development paradigms in developed world have not been able to take care of
current generations let alone of future generations. He said the conference
would help us analyse whether Western prescriptions were relevant, financially
viable, had relevance with countries’ political will, had capacity to meet the
demands at grassroots level and expertise at implementers’ level to deliver.
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