Syed Naveed Qamar, Federal Minister for Water and Power, has said that instead of embroiling with different kinds of conflicts tormenting the lives of billion of people in South Asia, 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.
Naveed Qamar was speaking at the inaugural session of 14th Sustainable Development Conference (SDC) on Re-defining paradigms of sustainable development in South Asia organised by Sustainable Development Policy Institute here on Tuesday.
The minister said that the region 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 MFN status to India and Pak-China joint initiatives, he said that cooperation and partnership between the countries in the region is of utmost importance which would enable us to resolve our issues and challenges. He appreciated SDPI for its independent expert contributions for national policy-making in past and hoped that it will continue its people-centred work in future. He observed that the region needed to redefine its approach towards poverty reduction while its orientation towards development also needs to be redefined with greater regional cooperation and integration.
Dr. Saeed Shafqat, Chairperson, BoG, SDPI, said that this years theme had special significance not only for the region as the states prioritised policy agendas for the 2nd decade of 21st Century but also for SDPI itself as it struggles to re-set its goals and re-interpret its institutional mandate defined as the enhancement of peace, social justice and well-being, within and across generations.
Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Executive Director, SDPI, launching the SDC 2010 Anthology ‘Peace and sustainable development in South Asia: the Way Forward’ referred to existing global crises involving economic, social, political and environmental dimensions. He said that prevalent development paradigms in developed world have not been able to take care of the current generations what to talk of future generations. He said the conference would help us to analyse if Western prescriptions had been relevant, financially viable and had capacity to meet the demands at grassroots level.
Dr Sabina Alkire from Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative in her keynote address said that measurement of poverty needs to take into account multi-faceted nature of deprivations faced by the poor. She said that according to Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2011 with particular reference to South Asia, 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 poor face.