There is a quiet shift happening across South Asia that rarely makes headlines, but may ultimately matter more than any regional summit or bilateral trade agreement. A new generation of leaders – sons and daughters of the political dynasties, business empires, and civic institutions that have long defined the region’s power structures – is beginning to step out of the shadows and into the mainstream. They have been joined by the youth, students and GenZees of the region.

These NextGen leaders are in their mid-thirties to mid-forties now. Some are advisors to the Prime Ministers, while others are Prime Ministers and Ministers themselves. Others run think tanks, lead multibillion-dollar business houses, lead chambers of commerce, or build tech startups reshaping their countries’ economies. And increasingly, they are asking a question their predecessors rarely found time for: Why is South Asia so broken? Why can’t we be advanced economies? Why are we still so divided?

South Asia is, by almost any measure, the least economically integrated region on earth. It is home to two billion people – for context, 25% of the world population resides in just 2.5% of the countries of the world, which comprise South Asia. The South Asian cultures have been part of the same mosaic for thousands of years – shared languages, shared cuisine, shared literary traditions, shared colonial bondage and shared traumas. And yet intra-regional trade as a share of total trade hovers somewhere around five per cent – a fraction of what comparable regions manage.

A Pakistani entrepreneur, a Bangladeshi tech........

© Daily Times