Kaleidoscopic Patterns
ARIF A. WAQIF
SOUTH ASIAN PERSPECTIVES: SEVEN NATIONS IN CONFLICT AND COOPERATION by Bhabani Sen Gupta B R Publishing Corporation, Delhi, 1989, 260 pp., 150
March-April 1989, volume 13, No 2

The movement toward regional cooperation in South Asia can take credit not only for the hundreds of annual official and unofficial meetings, seminars and workshops, but also for modest achievements in terms of evolving various activities and institutional mechanisms which can help ensure more concrete forms of cooperation for the benefit of the common South Asian citizen in the future. Among the activities one may first mention the nine areas of cooperation officially agreed upon by the member states of SAARC. These were recently increased to twelve. Specific regional programmes are being developed in these ‘non-controversial’ areas. The second series of activities aims at promoting people-to-people contact through audio-visual-informational- educational exchanges, organized tourism, etc.. At the same time various institutional arrangements are being actively pursued to facilitate cooperation in agriculture, technology, postal communications, drug abuse, etc.

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