After suffering a near-death experience, the Colombo Plan is in the throes of a Japanese-initiated rejuvenation effort. The goal: to turn the organisation into a pan-Asian agency that can help the region´s poorer countries benefit from the experience of the economic tigers of the East. For decades, The Colombo Plan was a household word across Asia. "Going on a Plan" had come to mean winning a prestigious scholarship to a foreign university. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Nepalis benefited from the Plan, earning degrees mainly in civil engineering, business management, urban planning or economics. Plan alumni today are in senior echelons from Malaysia to Pakistan.
By the 1990s, the Colombo Plan had slipped into obscurity. Even today, its two-storey, tile-roofed secretariat on a bylane in the Sri Lankan capital has the ambience of a sleepy backwater. Inside, fading photographs of stern-faced past directors adorn the walls. Across the city near the Colombo town hall, a granite obelisk marks the meeting in 1950 that launched the organisation called, rather lengthily, The Colombo Plan for the Economic and Social Development of South Asia and Southeast Asia.
But those were ambitiously optimistic times. The Second World War was just over, Asian countries were emerging out of colonialism, and the Cold War was already freezing up. Leaders and ministers of the British Commonwealth, including Jawaharlal Nehru, J.R. Jayawardene and Ghulam Mohammed, decided that Asia needed something like the Marshall Plan that had just helped rebuild Europe after the ravages of war. The Colombo Plan, which resulted from these deliberations, was the first multilateral effort in foreign aid in Asia. The key donor countries were Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the United States, and the organisation included Asian members of the Commonwealth like India, Ceylon and Pakistan.
By the late 1950s, membership had expanded to include non-Commonwealth nations like Thailand, Nepal, Indonesia, Laos, South Korea, Iran and Afghanistan. For the next decades, the Colombo Plan helped Asian developing countries with thousands of development projects, skills training, and scholarships. In three decades, a staggering 350,000 students had gone on the "Plan".