| October 8, 2003 | Wednesday | Sha’aban 11, 1424 |
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Breaking the impasse
Money around the neck
Special counsel is overkill
Saarc: developing human resources
IN MY last article I had presumed that US Deputy Secretary Armitage and Assistant Secretary Rocca would be coming to South Asia primarily to see what could be done to secure a resumption of the Indo-Pakistan dialogue. Prime Minister Jamali said after his White House meeting that President Bush had assured him that the US would play an active role in the revival of talks between India and Pakistan.
THE development of human resource has been recognized as one amongst many objectives of long-term economic growth by most developing countries since the early fifties. But it had moved to the centre stage of development priorities by the early seventies.
LAST week, Tony Blair addressed the seventh consecutive Labour Party conference as prime minister. At the end of his address, billed in advance as arguably the most crucial speech of his political career, he received a seven-minute standing ovation.
That was probably no more than a convenient coincidence. The threat to Blair’s leadership from within the party was exaggerated so that the absence of an outright revolt could be portrayed as a triumph.
Perhaps too much was also made of the speech Gordon Brown delivered on the day before Blair’s oration. The chancellor of the exchequer’s words were scoured for evidence of subtle, even subliminal, criticism of the prime minister.
Before Blair was anointed as Labour leader in 1994, in the wake of John Smith’s unexpected demise, he is believed to have struck a deal with Brown whereby the latter would, after a certain number of years, be elevated to the top of the party ladder.
If that was indeed the case, and if Blair has made it clear that he is in no hurry to honour the pledge, there is little Brown can do about it for the time being. The Labour Party is evidently in no mood to ditch the man who has led it to two consecutive electoral victories — at least not for as long as a third term in office seems within grasp.
The ruling party did, admittedly, suffer a bit of a shock last month when the Liberal Democrat candidate overturned a huge Labour majority to gain the seat of Brent East in a by-election. Until a few years ago, the constituency was represented in parliament by Ken Livingstone, the present mayor of London, who was forced to leave the Labour Party because the leadership refused to endorse his candidacy. His success against the official Labour candidate for mayor offered the first tangible proof that Blair’s party could fruitfully be challenged from the left.
To a certain extent, the Liberal Democrat upset makes the same point. Britain’s third largest party is by no means a radical force, but Labour has drifted so far to the right that the Lib-Dems seem attractively social democratic in comparison. When Blair, in his conference speech, mocked the Liberal Democratic proposal to raise taxes for the richest Britons in order to fund university education, he didn’t draw many cheers; as the prime minister must have known, at least half the people in the Bournemouth conference hall would have been only too pleased to adopt a similar plank.
Although the prospect of a free market in higher education alarms many Britons, the Brent East result is viewed more as an Iraq-related backlash.
Last February, at least 1.5 million people clogged the streets of London in an unprecedented protest against the impending war. Once the conflict was unleashed, a majority of Britons briefly lined up behind their government. Since the end of “major combat”, they have been faced with mounting evidence that the Blair regime went to extraordinary lengths to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Extracts from former foreign secretary Robin Cook’s diaries published earlier this week suggest that the prime minister was well aware that Baghdad was incapable of deploying any weapons of mass destruction at short notice. Cook, who resigned as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the government’s determination to toe the White House line, also says debates over Iraq provoked a near-revolt in Blair’s cabinet.
Although many Labour stalwarts have consistently opposed Blair’s Iraq policy with considerable passion, there was little sign at the Bournemouth conference of cabinet-level dissent.
Brown mentioned merely in passing the appropriateness of backing “our leader .... in his efforts today to bring security and reconstruction to Iraq” and praised “the professionalism and dedication of our armed forces” which does not quite add up to a ringing endorsement of the war, but at the same time cannot, on the face of it, be construed as overt criticism.
Defence secretary Geoff Hoon (who may well be on his way out after his conduct was called into question during the Hutton inquiry into the death of defence ministry adviser David Kelly) and foreign secretary Jack Straw (who has echoed Washington in claiming, somewhat bizarrely, that the failure to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction proves that it was right to go to war) were considerably more gung-ho.
Blair himself showed no contrition or remorse — and the contention that he respected the opinions of those who had opposed the war implied that he expected them to reciprocate. He trotted out the new standard line that what’s done is done and Saddam’s departure from the scene deserves to be celebrated.
The obvious problem with that approach is that it pre-emptively undermines future opposition to similarly misguided misadventures. Anyone who endorses, even retrospectively, this mode of regime change will run the risk of inconsistency in taking a contrary stand whenever the neo-conservative clique occupying the White House settles on its next target.
His government, Blair told the Labour conference, was out there on the side of George W. Bush “not because we’re America’s poodle” but because of the need to keep Britain safe. “It’s not so much American unilateralism I fear,” he went on. “It’s isolation.”
But the point, surely, is that if the United States is bent on defying world opinion and breaking international law, it deserves to be isolated rather than encouraged and abetted.
Many of Blair’s critics within Labour ranks believe that he committed himself to Bush’s aggression long before war resolutions came up before the House of Commons or the United Nations Security Council. They are almost certainly right.
This isn’t, of course, a novel trend in British foreign policy. There was never any serious attempt at neutrality throughout the cold war. Ironically, despite CIA suspicions that he was a Moscow agent, Harold Wilson ignored overwhelming Labour conference votes to support the US in its aggression against Vietnam (but stopped short of committing British troops). Margaret Thatcher was frighteningly well disposed towards Ronnie personally as well as virtually every manifestation of Reaganism.
But Blair appears to have gone even further in compromising Britain’s independence. This was demonstrated once again last Sunday when, after Israel’s unprovoked military incursion into Syria — the first in 20 years, and a potentially serious escalation of the Middle East conflict — a British Foreign Office spokesman issued a statement that sounded as if it had been drafted at the Pentagon. While Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder described the Israeli raid as unacceptable, Britain endorsed Israel’s right to defend itself.
Throughout the Iraq crisis, Blair has sought to pretend that “engagement” with the Bushies enables him to influence White House policies. If that’s not an outright lie then it’s certainly a delusion. And it appears not to be cutting any ice with the British electorate.
Were the swing witnessed in Brent East to be replicated nationwide at the next election, Britain’s political landscape would be transformed. That’s extremely unlikely, however. Brent East was a mid-term protest vote — a common enough phenomenon in Britain. And although Blair’s popularity ratings have lately been declining rather sharply, the main opposition Conservative Party remains unelectable for the time being. Yet, were a general election to be held today, Labour would find an absolute majority far harder to achieve than it did in 1997 or 2001.
Were the decline to continue apace, chances are that Blair would encounter a much cooler reception at next year’s party conference. In his speech, he was therefore hedging his bets more clearly than in recent years, tempering his Tory inclinations with invocations of traditional Labour values such as fairness and equity. He even broke a self-imposed taboo by mentioning the dreaded s-word: socialism. And with The Red Flag revived, on the insistence of unions and constituency parties, as a conference closer after a three-year hiatus, he displayed no qualms about intoning its unequivocal chorus: “Then raise the scarlet standard high/ Beneath its shade we’ll live and die...”
At the same time, aware that he was addressing not just the party faithful but also the rest of the nation, towards the end of his oration, Blair summoned up the ghost of Maggie Thatcher, the predecessor he most closely resembles in a number of respects. Back in 1980, barely a year into her reign, the Iron Lady responded to calls for a policy U-turn by famously declaring at the Conservative conference: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” In a conscious echo, the would-be Man of Steel said in Bournemouth last week: “I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear.”
That sounds like a manufacturing defect. Besides, no one particularly wants the prime minister to head backwards. But there is concern, naturally enough, over his inclination to take a sharp right turn at every blind corner — not to mention his dangerous habit of tailgating a particularly reckless driver called Dubya.
Eventually Blair must be made to realize that you can’t have your red flag and trample it too.
mahirali2@netscape.net
It has now become clear that this is not the focus of the Armitage visit and that he will be talking primarily about the worsening security situation in Afghanistan and the contribution expected from Pakistan to ameliorate it. It has also been revealed that during the recent US-Pakistan high level meetings the only written deal reached between the two sides was a letter of agreement signed between the two sides on September 23 during President Musharraf’s visit and that the commitments contained in this letter were reaffirmed during Prime Minister Jamali’s meeting with Secretary Powell.
These commitments, spelt out in an American State Department press release issued after Powell’s meeting with Jamali, included strengthening of Pakistan’s control over frontier areas bordering Afghanistan; continuing road construction in FATA; and creation of a border security coordination centre.
This was, as the press release made clear, part of the bilateral cooperation in the war against terrorism and the fight to stop narcotic drug trafficking.
Reading through the press briefings by the State Department spokesman in recent days the message one gets is that the United States is working with India and Pakistan to “look at some of the issues between them” and to encourage them to start engaging in discussions to resolve these issues (Department of State briefing) and, after the Pakistan missile test, “we have continued to urge both Pakistan and India to take steps to restrain their nuclear weapon and their missile programmes... We have also encouraged them to begin a dialogue on confidence-building measures... obviously we think that dialogue could be part of a broader engagement between the two countries to reduce tensions” (another briefing).
On “cross-border terrorism” the American position was “what I would say is the issue of cross-border terrorism remains important to us. President Musharraf has made commitments to end the cross-border activity, and that remains very important to us, and remains a subject of continuing discussion with the Pakistani government as they try to achieve that goal”.
There is nothing in the foregoing that suggests any particular pressure being applied to India to resume the dialogue with Pakistan. On the other hand, Prime Minister Vajpayee speaking to reporters maintained that President Bush had told President Musharraf in New York that Pakistan was running terrorist training camps and that these should be dismantled (Hindu) while an apparently “well-informed” Indian journalist maintained that Vajpayee had been told by President Bush that “US officials (he possibly meant Richard Armitage) had actually shown Musharraf satellite photos of the camps where terrorists were trained and asked him to shut them down” (Vir Sanghvim Hindustan Times)
Certainly there is no indication that there has been any appreciable slowing in the development of Indo-US relations because of Indian obduracy on the question of a dialogue with Pakistan. On the contrary we have reports of the commencement of a joint naval exercise, — Malabar 3 — involving a large number of ships and submarines and thousand of naval personnel. Earlier American and Indian commandos trained together in Jammu and Kashmir. Presumably the Americans were aware of the fact that this may well be construed as calling into question the stated UN and US position that Kashmir is a disputed territory, a fact which is still to be decided.
We have a statement from Secretary Powell, in an interview to the Washington Post that the United States had now decided on a “glide path” to meet Indian wishes for greater transfers from the US of equipment and technology in the “high-tech, space launch and in nuclear fields (referred to as the trinity of Indian demands).
This would be a three-phase programme in which in return for India taking certain steps such as strengthening its legal and physical capacity to restrict exports of sensitive technology, the US would respond by allowing greater transfers of high-tech and other equipment. Powell believed that the glide path approach had been well received in India and the exact details which were still being worked out would be announced shortly.
Sadly but realistically one must reach the conclusion that growth in Indo-US relations will not be made conditional on India taking steps to resolve its disputes with Pakistan. The only American requirement will be that India not take any step that increases the prospect of Indo-Pakistan military conflict or confrontation. The usual noises will be made but nothing concrete will be achieved.
The Indian posture is even tougher. End the infiltration and talk about issues other than Kashmir to create conditions in which Kashmir can be amicably resolved. This is an unrealistic posture but is likely to be maintained since India’s current rulers or at least their most important supporters believe that a tough, unyielding posture will yield dividends in the forthcoming state elections and the national elections in 2004.
The killings in Kashmir will continue. A recent well researched report in the Christian Science Monitor (Upsurge in boys drawn into Kashmir conflict) shows that the insurgency and its indigenous base is gaining strength. It points out that in the last year some 600 Kashmiri youth were reported as missing by their parents and have apparently been recruited by the freedom fighters. If 600 have been reported missing one can safely assume that two or three times that number has joined with parental consent.
The Indians will continue to maintain nonetheless that the insurgency is externally fomented. (The Christian Science Monitor report also says that these boys go across to Pakistan for training). They claim that 75 per cent of the “militants” killed this year are Pakistanis. They are proceeding with the fencing of the LoC. Their operations against the “militants” and their supporters are being intensified.
Few political or economic measures have been taken to ameliorate the situation in occupied Kashmir. In that regard they believe that having held the elections they have done what was needed and now further action would concentrate on breaking the unity of the political wing of the freedom struggle.
Meanwhile the war of words will continue with India believing that it has the world on its side and therefore can set aside the views of sane and sensible Indians who advocate a resumption of dialogue as the only pragmatic way forward.
So what should we do now? I believe that we should adopt a two-pronged approach. First, we should tell the Indians through diplomatic channels that we are prepared for a restoration of the situation that prevailed before the troop movements of December 2001. This would mean the resumption of the Samjhota train service and the air flights between the two countries in mutual interest — the resumption of overflights being more an Indian and less a Pakistani interest — bringing the diplomatic missions of the two countries back to the staffing levels of Dec. 2001 and intensifying the dialogue through diplomatic channels to resolve such humanitarian problems as detained fishermen in both countries.
These are not particularly imaginative steps; in one form or another they have figured in informal contacts — but presenting the proposal formally will give it greater weight particularly when it can be argued that this is what the Indians themselves profess to want.
Second, let us propose the setting up of a team that can work in tandem at the proposal of transit through Pakistan of Indian goods destined for Afghanistan and of gas from either Iran or Turkmenistan through Pakistan to India. The Indians have made much of the fact that Indian assistance to Afghanistan is becoming horrendously expensive because of the long route it has to take while Pakistan has been making much of the fact that by not accepting an Indo-Iranian gas pipeline through Pakistan India is missing a golden opportunity to promote regional cooperation. Perhaps a melding of the two proposals would make it workable politically for both sides.
Third, let us make it clear that at the forthcoming Saarc summit we expect that India will, in line with its own proposals, engage in “informal consultations” bilaterally to seek a better understanding of each other’s perspective.
As regards the Americans towards whom the second prong of our approach will be directed, we know they can use the leverage they enjoy with New Delhi to secure serious consideration of these proposals. It was clear then and has become clearer now that Prime Minister Vajpayee’s April peace overture was prompted by concerns that Washington had expressed about the rise in tensions prompted by intemperate statements from Indian leaders about their right to engage in pre-emptive strikes against Pakistan and their demands for including Pakistan in the “axis of evil”.
It yielded dividends. The Americans, welcoming the relaxation of tension, promptly withdrew their objections to the sale of the Israeli Phalcon radar system to India. Now they have the “glide path” to offer and can expect some Indian receptivity in this area, particularly when the Indians have turned them down flat on the idea of troops for Iraq.
We should reiterate to them Musharraf’s proposal for the dialogue on Kashmir and other issues. The Indian misinterpretation of Musharraf’s idea for reducing violence in Kashmir to score debating points should not be allowed to detract from its inherent merit or to denigrate the proposal as a whole.
Will this approach work? Probably not. But there is no harm in trying.
The writer is former foreign secretary of Pakistan.
IF a government were unable to impose restrictions on the words and deeds of the people, where would it land itself? Perhaps, it would, in course of time, wither away or die a natural death. What an exciting prospect!
But this is one of those things that one can only dream about. It has never happened in history. Governments have been deposed or dismissed, or even hacked to death, some of them have been known to have voluntarily resigned; but none of them has ever died a natural death.
More the restrictions a government places on the lives of its people, the more entrenched it becomes. A sort of vested interest protects it. Foreign powers may not be impressed by it or bother about its prohibitory orders, but the masses within the country fear it more and more. It begins to run their lives for them. In some countries you can’t even have children without the permission of the ruling regime.
I often wonder who in the government takes those minor decisions some of which eventually become the corner-stone of its policies. I was in government all my serving life. Try as I did I could never find this out. There were many theories. Some decisions had emanated from the wives of those who mattered. In one case it was an old domestic servant who gave the idea. But I was never able to pinpoint the real powers-that-be.
Take an example. Some time ago the special correspondent of a daily paper reported that “the federal government will impose restrictions on the use of currency note garlands to discourage their public display.” The chap didn’t say whose idea it exactly was, although, if he were a good reporter, he should have got to the bottom of it. But I was pleased that the government, having solved all other big and small problems of the people, could now relax and think about currency note garlands.
Now who can it really be who first thought of this brilliant move? Was it an officer who saw these garlands hanging outside a shop and vowed to end them because they reminded him of an unhappy marriage? Or was it an officer’s begum whom APWA had failed to garland with one at a society function and spoiled her day? We’ll never know, and I bet the special correspondent too will not be able to find out.
The story in that newspaper was quite detailed and had a number of facets to show how the federal government was worried about the people’s attitude towards money, about the rising trend in ostentation, and about the disappearance of whole bundles of currency notes from the State Bank of Pakistan and their re- emergence in the form of garlands. It is a complex issue, and the only way it can be resolved, or made more complicated, is to limit the prevalence of this practice.
But I was pleased to read that it was not going to be a complete ban, and the restrictions on these garlands will be there only to discourage the public display of money through them which the government does not like for some reason. This is both sensible and realistic. Wise governments never ban a thing totally. A loophole must always be kept for friendly defaulters.
In fact I agree with the government that the public display of money garlands should not be allowed. Long ago one such garland was put around my neck by fawning subordinates when I had been promoted. As soon as I got home and was alone I counted the money. The total was exactly Rs. 303. I still wear that garland on the anniversary of my retirement and look at myself in the mirror. This is a purely private act and I hope it will not be considered public display. I don’t want to be hauled up at my age. But I do deplore the meanness of my erstwhile subordinates. Imagine, only Rs 303.
The newspaper story said that the law-makers are conscious of the adverse reaction of garland-makers and that is the reason for not completely prohibiting the use of these garlands. This means that the government has been sounding out the concerned parties and has discovered that they are not going to like the restriction. I wonder if the government also tried to find out what prospective brides and bridegrooms think about the matter. Their opinion is very important.
You see, the penalty envisaged for unlawful display of currency notes in this fashion will naturally be confiscation of the precious garland and a possible fine. The point is, will the bride and groom wearing them also be confiscated? The police raiding the premises may be inclined to let off the bridegroom but it will love to take the bride away to the thana as proof.
Citing a number of reasons for the decision, an official (in the story) specially quoted cases from the Frontier Province where crooks abducted little children merely because they were wearing currency note garlands. The idiots! Why couldn’t they just snatch the garland and run away? Why carry a screaming kid to impede their getaway? This only shows that this official had never abducted a child wearing such a valuable garland. Well, not all public servants are that experienced.
Talking of concerned officials, I wonder if the garland- makers are aware of their existence. I mean who they actually are, what are their names and their status in government, why are they bugged by these garlands, and how come are they not worried about the other, more glaring, incidents of ostentation and show of wealth, particularly at weddings?
Since this is a question of their bread and butter, the garland-makers should locate and identify the relevant officials and present their point of view before them, just as other traders do when they are affected by government decisions. They can argue that garland-making and garland-wearing is a harmless activity, and they can always trace its existence to some ancient cultural practice. Culture always makes a good excuse for continuing an anti-social custom.
I am sure the officials will be more amenable to their arguments once they can be made to wear one of the more expensive varieties (and not the one valued at Rs 303) around their necks. The garland-makers will be surprised how the feel of the currency notes changes the views of these officials about their product.
PRESIDENT Bush is right. The Justice Department, not a special counsel, should investigate allegations that an administration official illegally leaked the name of a CIA employee whose husband had authoritatively disputed White House claims that Iraq attempted to buy uranium ore in Niger.
Neither an appointed special counsel nor a new independent counsel act — which Sen. Joe Lieberman, a presidential candidate, is calling for — would be helpful or desirable.
The Independent Counsel Act, which Congress allowed to lapse in 1999, was a bad idea from the beginning. Until they were put out of business, prosecutors under this act conducted open-ended investigations that wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, harassed elected officials and produced scant prosecutable crimes.
—Los Angeles Times
The reasons which brought about this shift in priorities were many but three main factors played a critical role. The first was the general disillusionment with the purely growth-oriented development strategies pursued in the fifties and sixties with their major thrust on the directly productive sectors and supporting physical infrastructure. But in many cases, this resulted in the neglect of social sectors, principally education, health, housing and other social services.
The second factor emerging from the results of economic research confirmed that investment in human capital could contribute significantly and directly to overall growth and development. This was especially true for investment in skill development programmes and investment in basic health services, including access to clean drinking water.
Finally, there was the realization that the strategy which emphasized the provision of increasing productive employment for the labour force, as well as increasing productivity, especially in the so-called ‘informal’ sectors of the economy would provide the best route to solving the apparent dichotomy between growth and development.
The author of the 1995 UNDP Human Development Report, Dr Mahbubul Haq, rightly said: “South Asia’s real wealth is its people. We can completely change the economic and political destiny of the South Asian countries if we show the imagination to invest in these people.
Saarc region, according to Human Development Report 2000, enters the 21st Century with 515 million people in absolute poverty, some 400 million illiterate adults, and approximately 80 million malnourished children. Preventable diseases kill 3.2 million children each year in South Asia.
During the last half century, there has been significant economic growth in the Saarc region. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has almost tripled since 1960. All three major sectors — agriculture, industry and service — have witnessed reasonable growth over the last 30-35 years. In particular, the service sector has expanded greatly; in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, it now contributes over 45 per cent of GDP.
Poverty and human deprivation pervades the Saarc region. Progress in some areas in this region has been made compared to the initial conditions at independence. But high population growth rates in some countries have neutralized progress achieved earlier. Also concern for human development has not been enough of a priority in the region.
The result is that there are now increasing absolute numbers of people without adequate health and sanitation, more under-nourished children and more people who are illiterate. Also increasingly important is the withering away of traditional livelihoods as a result of unsustainable environmental practices. A prosperous future for the Saarc region is dependent on the solution of these problems.
Within Saarc there is much to be gained from cooperation in terms of poverty reduction, social sector development, tourism, energy, transport and communication. At the tenth Saarc summit in Colombo in 1998 a social charter was proposed to deal with many social issues and with efforts to address the many derivations faced by the largely poor, uneducated, and under-served population in the region.
At the eleventh summit held at Kathmandu in January 2002, the heads of state or government of the Saarc countries reiterated the need for an early finalization of the Saarc social charter and instructed the governmental expert group to expedite its work and present it for consideration at the next meeting of the council of ministers.
Saarc region has all the potential to become the most dynamic region in the 21st century if there is adequate investment in human development. It can learn a great deal from the development strategies followed in recent decades by Japan, he East Asian tigers, and China.
It was through human development strategies that a major breakthrough was made by Japan in the 1940s and 1950s; by the East Asian tigers (Korea, former Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand) in the 1960s and 1970 and by China in the 1980s and 1990s. There is considerable evidence of the benefits of investment in human development also in the Saarc region.
The Human Development Report of 1998 in South Asia cited the following:
* In urban India, when mothers were uneducated, the child mortality rate was as high as 82 per thousand, but it dropped sharply to 34 per thousand when mothers were educated.
* In Bangladesh, contraceptive use was only 27 per cent for women with no education but increased to 66 per cent for women with more than secondary education.
* In Pakistan, a study has estimated that its per capita GDP in 1985 would have been 25 per cent higher if, in 1960, it had had Indonesia’s primary school enrolment rates.
* In Nepal, increasing the average education of a farmer by one year expanded agricultural output by 5.2 per cent in the Terai region and by 5.9 per cent in the hill region.
* In India, increasing average primary schooling of the work force by one year increased output by 23 per cent.
* In Sri Lanka, high female literacy (87 per cent) has contributed to a decline in the rate of population growth to only 1.3 per cent a year.
Thus, there is clear evidence from the Saarc region’s own experience that investment in human development leads to many social benefits, including improvements in standards of hygiene, reduction in infant and child mortality, decline in population growth rates, increase in labour productivity, rise in civic consciousness, greater political empowerment and democratization and an improved sense of national unity. However, Saarc region economies cannot hope to achieve a decisive breakthrough in development or to become the industrial tigers of the future without a generous investment in human development.
The heads of state and government of Saarc countries agreed to establish the Saarc Human Resource Development Centre (SHRDC) with the object of undertaking research, imparting training and disseminating information on HRD-related issues and advising the member states on related policies and strategies. Pakistan offered to host the centre at Islamabad and it came into being in 1999.
Regional Training on Poverty Alleviation through HRD: The objective of this training programme is to strengthen the ability of the participants to formulate policies and design programmes and projects to alleviate poverty in their respective countries. The training course was held from 15-28 September 2003. Participants from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka took part in the course.
Regional training on gender and development: The objectives of this training programme are to strengthen the ability of the participants in carrying out critical analysis in the broad area of gender issues. This training is being held this month.
In most developing countries vocational and technical education and training (VTET) has been identified as a leading component in HRD. The Saarc region is also attempting to cater to the future needs of the work force. The objective of the training course is to strengthen the abilities of participants to identify the importance of VTET. The training course will be held on 8-22 December, 2003.
Every member country of Saarc is spending a large percentage of its annual budget on human resource development through different sectors. Today, specialization has reached a point that there are research, development and training centres exclusively or partly engaged in the improvement or development of human resource in the Saarc region. In the absence of such work SHRDC is bringing out a directory of HRD institutions in the Saarc countries. SHRDC has also launched its website.
SHRDC plans in future to concentrate on core and focussed programmes of activities, which will give tangible benefit to the member states in the region according to its mandate and terms of references. The centre is also gathering HRD-related study reports and other relevant information which are readily available with the member states and the Saarc secretariat, and compiling these information in order to draw up a road map for future plan of activities of the centre.
The writer is acting director of Saarc Human Resource Development Centre.