Shankar, a salesman in a roadside clay pottery shop, reached for a work knife to prevail over a customer haggling over the price of decorative doorbells, forcing the Pakistani customer to comply with his demand.

The young salesman knew that the customer was a Saarc delegate but his desperation to make a few extra bucks did not allow him to show courtesy and display the traditional South Asian hospitality.

It is hard to blame him for his desperate behaviour as it has become increasingly hard for the toiling people of the region to sustain in the face of backbreaking price hike touching record levels all through the region. In Sri Lanka, the inflation is running high at 26.6 per cent currently.

Against 24 per cent of the world total population, 40 per cent of the world poor live in this region of 1.5 billion people. About 35 per cent of them are surviving on less than a dollar a day. All countries of the region are faced with similar problems of law and order, poverty, unemployment, income inequality, low productivity and negligence of commodity producing sectors making them dependent on donors and therefore more vulnerable to external economic shocks.

Will the current 15th Summit of the heads of state in Colombo achieve anything tangible for the poor teeming millions of this most populated region inhabited by about one-forth of the total population of the world ?

“I see no reason to expect any wonder this time around. For the last 23 years since its inception in Bangladesh in 1985 the leaders have been meeting making all the right noises but not much has been achieved”, said an economic analyst of Sri Lanka.

A year after focusing on connectivity in the last year’s summit, most delegates converging in Colombo had to take a flight via the Middle East or the Far East to reach Sri Lanka. People travelling from Pakistan stopped over at Doha that took them 11 hours to cover a distance of three to four hours from their home cities. Bangladeshis flew to Singapore and Bangkok and spent 12 hours to reach a destination two hours away from Dhaka.

“This is ridiculous. Consider how much more people have to spend for intra regional traveling. The leaders should walk the talk or suspend this expensive circus. They should stop playing to the gallery”, said Muslehuddin a frustrated businessman from Bangladesh.

“It takes time to make a regional grouping effective as process of confidence building is long drawn. In my view Saarc is at a turning point, graduating from a stage of declaration to implementation”, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, foreign minister of Pakistan told Dawn on the sidelines of the concluding session of South Asia Free Media Association.

“There was a lot of very useful interaction with my colleagues of brotherly member states in Columbo over the last two days and I am highly optimistic about the future of this organisation”, he added.

According to an anonymous study, the region misses business opportunities worth $8 billion annually due to weak co-operation. It revealed that the region could double the amount of investments they attract by checking corruption alone.

If ‘unofficial’ businesses in the region could be checked, business opportunities worth three to four times the current level would have been created, a high ranking official of Bangladesh has reported to have said at a investment conference in Bangladesh recently.

“If the core strengths of Saarc countries are combined and leveraged, the region has immense potential to grow at geometrical rates”, an Indian telecom expert told Dawn.

“There was some excitement in the business circles when South Asian Free Trade Agreement was concluded in 2002 in Islamabad. It has been six years and intra regional trade is still a fraction of the total volume of trade in the region”, said a lady news editor of a daily newspaper, expressing her disappointment with Saarc.

There is little doubt that individually most countries of the region have made big strides over the last twenty years and their economies have expanded remarkably. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have restructured their economies to a great measure and repositioned themselves.

They have posted high growth rates. The massive growth in telephony and media has changed their societies beyond recognition. The benefits of development might not have been as broad-based as it needs to be, it certainly has broadened the base of the middle class in South Asian cities.

Collectively, however, they have not been able to move beyond planning. “It is absolutely necessary but not sufficient. For it is rather futile if not followed up by implementation”, said an officer accompanying the PM in his delegation to Saarc Summit.

“We have agreed on a Saarc Fund, a Food Bank, a Saarc university and to introduce uniform standards to cement our relationship and respond collectively to the current crisis of food and fuel”, Pernam Mukerjee, foreign minister of India said in a meeting before the Summit.

“Inspired by the European Union and ASEAN Saarc leaders are drawn towards the idea of complementarities but lack political will and confidence required to open up within the region”, observed a senior journalist from India.

Saarc is more natural an alliance than any other regional grouping still interests groups oriented towards elsewhere or driven by their narrow short term interests seem to be too deeply entrenched in member states to take the natural course.