A Citizen’s Social Charter for South Asia: An Agenda for Civic Action

A Citizen's Social Charter for South Asia: An Agenda for Civic Action by Prof. Rehman Sobhan presents the outcome of a six-year effort by the South Asia Centre for Policy Studies (SACEPS), which commissioned a Task Force drawn from across the region to prepare a Citizen's Social Charter for South Asia (CSCSA). Citizen's groups from Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka participated in this process, and this volume is the first published on the CSCSA. The book is divided into two parts. Part I presents the CSCSA and the National Citizen's Social Charters prepared by citizen's groups in each of the six countries. These charters spell out obligations for each South Asian state to address vital social issues such as poverty eradication, women's empowerment, protection of children and the elderly, environmental degradation, and human resource development, along with specific plans of action, policies, programmes, and resource allocations. Part II reviews the preparatory process, containing reports of the three meetings of the Citizen's Task Force convened by SACEPS in 2002, 2003, and 2004 in Dhaka and Colombo. These reports capture the rich discussions involved in designing the CSCSA and the initiatives needed to operationalise it, with the final meeting in Dhaka in February 2004 pointing to the need to build a broad constituency of citizen's groups in each country. The CSCSA and national charters should serve as instruments for social mobilisation by citizen's groups committed to the concerns of the deprived and excluded, and the volume provides policymakers, citizens, scholars, students, and the development community with a better understanding of the actions needed to correct the injustices permeating South Asian society.