Washington, DC recently witnessed the hosting of a soft launch of the NextGen Leaders Forum (NGLF), a new network of South Asian young professionals. Some 40 participants joined in a hybrid session at the Atlantic Council. The opening remarks laid out the Forum’s vision as follows.

Whenever one looks around a room where South Asian regional policy is being discussed, one notices something telling: the grey hair. Former ambassadors, retired technocrats, senior academics – people well past sixty debating questions that will be answered long after they have left the stage. I know because I am one of them.

That realisation hit me with particular force this past June, when colleagues and I gathered a group of next-generation leaders from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States for the inaugural NextGen Leaders Forum. The organisers were mostly past sixty. We were not the audience. We were, with luck, the scaffolding. The most useful thing we can do at this stage of our careers is not hold another conference among ourselves – it is to get out of the way.

What we know, from decades of working in this part of the world, is that the region’s problems are solvable — not easily, not quickly, not without conflict and setback, but solvable.

What we know, from decades of working in this part of the world, is that the region’s problems are solvable — not easily, not quickly, not without conflict and setback, but solvable.

South Asia is home to nearly two billion people, sharing history, culture, languages, rivers, and a civilizational inheritance stretching back millennia. It also has the dubious distinction of being the least economically integrated region on the planet: intra-regional trade sits at barely five per cent of total trade, against ASEAN’s twenty-five per cent and the European Union’s sixty per cent. The scale of........

© Daily Times