DISMANTLE SAARC

With both China and Russia intending to be observers while Iran requests a full membership, the future of SAARC would ideally have looked quite sanguine if it had exploited its true potential.
Unfortunately the SAARC has miserably failed to live up to expectations with the Indo-Pakistan conflict overshadowing everything else. In fact the sideline talks of the two countries during the SAARC summits continue to attract more attention than the main SAARC conference itself, so much so the latter now looks more like a facilitating conference for Indo-Pakistan bi-lateral talks on Kashmir and terrorists.
As a result SAARC still remains the least united regional organization in the world with trade among the SAARC countries accounting for only 2% of the combined GDP of its nations. Even in neighbouring East-Asia this accounts to about 20 per cent while other regional bodies like the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the African Union (AU) have made major headway especially in trade.
If everything goes well, the UNASUR countries will eliminate tariff for non-sensitive products by 2014 and for sensitive products by 2019 --thus making the zone one single market.
The African Union has already begun a step-by-step process to establish an African Economic Community with a common currency and single a central bank by 2023.
With diverging security and political interests, and with culture being the only binding factor, the SAARC despite its strength –1.5 billion people-- or one fifth of the global population, remains directionless when it comes to collective strength. The inertia of the regional body had resulted in its member states becoming a bully victim of other regional bodies like EU which has a mere 500 million population. The need to plead for GSP plus concessions would not have arisen if South Asia had a vibrant economic zone.
While some 53 states work in tandem in the African Union for a common currency and some 27 states do business in the EU, the eight nations in the South Asian regional union which has been in existence for 17 long years have failed to achieve anything substantial so far.
The strength of the region India, the world’s fourth largest country by purchasing power parity (PPP) also remains its weakness as the gulf of power imbalance created by overpowering India is not something others could bridge.
If SAARC nations cannot work together due to conflicting interests, then the member states better dismantle the organization and join neighbouring regional bodies where there is better parity of status and reap whatever benefits available.