COVID-19 and South Asia: National Strategies and Subregional Cooperation for Accelerating Inclusive, Sustainable and Resilient Recovery

Abstract

Starting as a health emergency, COVID-19-the global pandemic has evolved into an economic and a ‘human crisis,’ of mammoth proportions. As governments locked down the populations in an effort to contain the pandemic to save lives, economic activities have been disrupted, leaving millions of people jobless, pushing them into poverty and hunger, and plunging the world economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. South Asia, a subregion with nearly a quarter of world’s population but over a third of world’s people living in extreme poverty and hunger, has been impacted severely given the vast proportion of population living at the margins, fragmented coverage of social protection, pervasive informality in economic activities and employment, and wide gaps in public health infrastructure. Millions of workers have been rendered jobless, inequalities have been accentuated and the crisis is likely to reverse years, if not decades, of gains in poverty reduction, undermining the progress made by the subregion towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).