Awareness includes creating awareness on SAARC as a region and the potential of the SAARC asset class.
The Disaster Management Center of the South Asia Association of Regional Cooperation46 (SAARC) is an example of a platform of influence for science within a group of countries that cover a large section of the world population in low- and middle-income countries.
Similarly, rural population (RPOP) and unemployment (UEMP) were negatively associated with financial inclusion in the SAARC countries: a 1% increase in rural population led to a 1.615% decrease in financial inclusion, and a 1% increase in UEMP led to a 0.671% decrease in financial inclusion.
India, which would prefer to see SAARC as a mechanism for extending its dominant regional influence, never likes its neighbours' "playing the China card".
SAARC devised a policy of regional cooperation in the energy sector.
The exclusionary nature of the existing framework of SAARC provokes a biased and unfruitful multilateral cooperation in any critical issues like the trans-boundary river water sharing.
The minimal evidence of the environmental cooperation under the auspices of SAARC is an important example of such failure.
Similarly, to ascertain the effect of Internet usage on financial inclusion in SAARC countries, we performed a regression using the financial inclusion index with the number of Internet subscribers per 100 people, and using other control variables (e.g., Y, RPOP, UEMP, and EDU), as in the previous regressions.
But Mr Singh and the leaders of Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka did at least agree that things could change: SAARC, they agreed, would embark on a "decade of implementation".There are reasons to hope that SAARC can slough off its inertia.
The biggest step that SAARC has taken in this respect, a regional free-trade area, involving sharp cuts in customs tariffs, is due to come into force on January 1st.
Similarly, a few of the SAARC countries have made efforts to extend the drive toward financial inclusion.
