Regional Integration in South Asia: India’s Concerns and Perceptions

Despite registering a robust growth rate, India is still facing serious challenges from many non-conventional threats such as poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, underdevelopment, terrorism and illicit trafficking of people and drugs. The primary reasons have been uneven distribution of resources within India and lack of regional and regional integration within South Asia. While India’s perception of a looming threat from the expanding Chinese sway and the virtual China-Pakistan axis prevented it from taking effective initiatives towards regional integration, smaller South Asian countries, on the other hand, perceived India as a domineering player. In fact, certain neighbourhood policy measures of New Delhi only helped in feeding misperceptions of its neighbours. Even the achievement of a modest level of regional integration has the possibility of inducing higher growth rates, but also of steering the South Asian economies towards inclusive growth by opening up larger markets, keeping the prices of many products low and providing different access points to avail of health and education services.