The SAARC was founded nearly two and a half decades ago. It was mainly a symbolic organization at the outset and tinkered with economic regionalism.
The forum also did not try to address the issues such as facilitating regional trade and investments in the European community (EC) model that could play a very significant role in uplifting the lot of the South Asian Countries which are home to a quarter of all humanity.
But SAARC has been changing and the last three SAARC summits have been particularly active in giving a functional shape to the regional organization.
First, the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement (SAFTA) came into existence that involved reciprocal duty concessions on some traded items by the member countries.
It was followed by the more ambitious South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA).
The SAFTA, in particular, has set clearly defined goals of making South Asia a free trade area 1ike the EC in stages.
It has drawn up a comprehensive plan of action under a detailed framework for duty reductions and finally duty eliminations from a wide range of products.
It also leaves safeguards for the backward countries of SAARC to carry out such duty reductions and eliminations by giving them a notably longer period to do so.
The SAFTA is already at the implementation stage and is expected to pick up speed in the coming years. It has, indeed, the potentials of increasing manifold the regional trade which are presently trickles only.
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