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Pak entrepreneur moots common airline, bank, open university for South Asia

Gautam Chakravarty and Anurag Joshi in Bombay

An indifferent approach from the governments and industry in South Asia to his ideas of starting a common airline, bank and open university for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation region, has forced S M Inam, a leading Pakistani entrepreneur, to look beyond the region to tap funds for his dream projects.

In an exclusive interview to UNI, Inam, who is in Bombay as head of the Pakistani delegation to attend the IX International Conference on Small and Medium Enterprises, disclosed that he is seeking $ 400 million assistance from a Singaporean organisation to start the SAARC open university and expecting funds to the tune of $ 120 million from institutions in China for setting up hospitals in countries of the SAARC region.

''For the airline, an agreement has been signed with a foreign partner to provide technical knowhow,'' said Inam.

The airline project is called the SAARC Airline Transport Services and would have a capital base of $ 1 billion.

The SAARC open university would be headquartered at the SAARC secretariat in Kathmandu and would be headed by Inam. ''We are currently working out the investment modalities with a Singaporean organisation,'' he said.

''The objective of setting this university will be to bring uniformity in the education systems of the seven countries in the region,'' he said.

Also, a common banking institution called the South Asia Development Bank has been planned with an equity base of $ 1 billion. ''The three objectives of the bank would be to remove poverty, eradicate illiteracy and eliminate disease from the region,'' Inam said.

''The bank would lend to industries at an annual interest rate of 5 per cent, '' he said.

Also on the anvil is a common commodity bank for the region.

Inam, who is the founder-president of the SAARC Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the South Asian Association for Small and Medium Enterprises, is among the few who enjoy a SAARC visa.

The visa enables him to travel throughout the region without availing of a visa from individual countries in the region.

He feels that the animosity between India and Pakistan has been created by certain groups, who would not like people in the two countries to live as friends. But at the ground-level a sense of goodwill exists between the two countries, he says.

''By 2002 AD, the two countries would shed the nuclear arms race and cooperate jointly in the field of atomic research for peaceful purposes,'' he predicted.

UNI

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