- Prelims: Current events of international importance, G20, Global south, Inflation etc.
- Mains GS Paper II & III: Significance of G20 countries, Bilateral, regional and global grouping and agreements involving India or affecting India’s interests.
ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS
- Pandemics, economic slumps and extreme weather events were once tail-end risks, but all three have hit South Asia in rapid succession since 2020.
INSIGHTS ON THE ISSUE
Context
South Asia:
- It is the southern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms.
- The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
- India’s vision of regional economic integration in South Asia is based on enhanced intra-regional trade, investment flows and regional transport and communication links in South Asia.
- South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and India’s Neighbourhood First Policy are the two vehicles in this process.
Background about South Asia:
- South Asia’s people are its biggest asset but remain wastefully underutilized.
- Half its population under the age of 24 and over one million young people set to enter the labor force every month until 2030,
- South Asia is home to over one third of the world’s stunted children.
- A child born in the region today can, by the age of 18, expect to attain only 48% of their full productive potential.
- If the quantity and quality of South Asia’s human capital were to improve, regional GDP per worker could double.
South Asian spending and condition:
- South Asian governments on average spend just 1% of GDP on health and 5(two point five)% on education.
- The global average is 9(five point nine)% on health and 3.7(% on education.
- COVID-19 pandemic: It pushed an additional 35 million people across South Asia into extreme poverty,
Impact:
- Rise in learning poverty, or the inability to read and understand a simple text by age 10.
- World( average): schools remained closed for in-person learning between 2020 and 2022 for 141 days, in South Asia they were shut for 225 days.
- This increased South Asia’s learning poverty from 60% to 78%.
- The poorest and most vulnerable people fell further behind.
- For example: In Bangladesh, the poorest students lost 50% more in terms of learning than the richest students.
- Several countries: show little to no signs of recovery, and South Asia’s students could lose up to 4(fourteen point four)% of their future earnings.
Recent steps in South Asia: Evidence suggests that even simple and low-cost education programmes can lead to sizable gains in skills.
- In Bangladesh, for example, attending a year of additional preschool through two-hour sessions significantly improved literacy, numeracy, and social-development scores.
- Tamil Nadu, six months of extra remedial classes after school helped students catch up on about two-thirds of lost learning linked to 18 months of school closure
- In Nepal, government teachers ran a phone tutoring programme that helped increase students’ foundational numeracy by 30%.
- A new World Bank study, “Collapse and Recovery: COVID eroded human capital and what to do about it”.
- It analyzes the pandemic’s impacts on young people
- stresses the multi-dimensional
- complementary nature of human development.
- The health, education, and skills people acquire at various stages of their lives, build and depend on each other.
Way Forward
- The knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate — their human capital — is a critical source of the resilience that countries rely on for recovery.
- To strengthen resilience and protect the well-being of future generations, governments across South Asia need to take urgent policy action and invest in human capital.
- While the outlook is grim, it is important to remember that well-designed and implemented interventions can make a difference if governments act fast.
- Globally, countries that have systems in place to support individuals and families before a crisis strikes, can better protect their citizens during the crisis.
- To be effective, human development systems must recognise and exploit these overlapping connections. In other words, they should be agile, resilient and adaptive.
- A well-functioning system is one that can spring into action the moment a shock strikes, ensure essential services such as health care and learning remain uninterrupted, and have the flexibility to evolve as needs change,
- such as social protection systems that ramp up to meet urgent needs.
- Since services are provided by different individual sectors, human development systems must be able to coordinate efficiently across sectors.
- As data and technology play a crucial role in the delivery of services, human development systems should ensure they are effectively used.
- A robust human development system would not only mitigate the damage but also help ensure lives and livelihoods are protected.
- It could provide the resilience South Asia needs to prosper in an increasingly volatile world.
QUESTION FOR PRACTICE
The long sustained image of India as a leader of the oppressed and marginalized nations has disappeared on account of its new found role in the emerging global order.’ Elaborate(UPSC 2019) (200 WORDS, 10 MARKS)
