Afghanistan´s child mortality rate is second from the bottom, only Sierra Leone´s is worse. A Nepali woman is more likely to die at childbirth than a woman in Niger. The percentage of Bangladeshi children who are underweight because they don´t have enough to eat is the highest in the world-much worse than, say, Somalia. Even Sri Lanka, a country that was regarded as a model of development, is slipping.
Measured by the standard parameters for gauging human quality of life, southern Asia is right down there with the impoverished, dirt poor and war-ravaged African states. Shocking and shameful as these statistics may be, South Asia´s misery stands out even more starkly because neighbouring East Asian countries are doing so well. Countries like Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea, which till 40 years ago were at the same level of development as some South Asian countries, now have education and health statistics at par with industrialised countries.
Asia, in fact, is no longer one continent. The gap in income and quality of life between Southeast Asian countries and South Asia today resembles the gap between Africa and Europe. And measured in terms of the sheer scale of the misery, South Asia´s poor outnumber Africa´s nearly three to one.
More that half of the world´s poorest, 600 million of them, live in South Asia, and half of those, mostly children, do not have enough to eat. One in every three new-bom babies in South Asia is underweight because mothers are undernourished and anemic. There are fewer women per 100 men in South Asia than anywhere else in the world. Reason: preference for male offspring. One in every three South Asians cannot read or write. There are 150 million children here who do not go to school.