Particularly, South Asia struggles to get out of low-growth equilibrium and achieve above or equal to six percent GDP growth rate. To foster the economic growth, one of the biggest challenges that this region face is the growing demand of energy. During the last decade, the energy consumption has been doubled to 9 percent than the preceding decade in South Asia. It is anticipated that the demand of energy will again be doubled by the end of this decade. How this growing need of energy can be met?

South Asian region is a land of potential power resources, which, if properly harnessed, would change the economic landscape of the region. The richly endowed natural resources such as water potential of Nepal, Bhutan, India and Pakistan, the natural gas of Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the coal of India are in abundance for the generation of power which can be of tremendous benefits to the region. Located in close proximity to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, South Asia has the advantage of importing gas and oil from these countries too. India's and Pakistan's growing need of energy can be met either by importing available energy from neighbouring SAARC countries or by importing from third-party countries using the territory of SAARC neighbouring countries. This framework requires a greater cooperation among the South Asian countries, which can be achieved especially under the SAARC framework. In the context of developing energy markets, power trading in the region calls for establishment of high voltage interconnections between the national grids of the countries of the region. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh should also cooperate closely in establishing gas pipelines in South Asia for transporting gas from Iran, Qatar, Turkmenistan and even Myanmar.

Specifically, the ongoing official negotiations on transporting oil and gas from Iran through Pakistan to India; transporting gas from Myanmar to India through pipeline on Bangladesh should be brought to an early and successful conclusion. As a part of negotiations, as is disclosed, Bangladesh seeks permission to use India's National Electricity Grid to import hydro-electricity from Nepal and Bhutan. Pakistan already gave a green-signal to India that it would cooperate to use its territory to transport oil and gas to India through pipeline from Iran or other central Asian countries. The ongoing different bilateral initiatives on energy cooperation give it a shape of multilateral cooperation, which can be solved under the umbrella of SAARC.

At the backdrop of the 13th SAARC summit in Dhaka on November, we hope that the member states can explore the possibility of energy cooperation in this region in light of greater energy security of this region, and draft a framework on it which can be a basis of ensuring peace and prosperity of this region in future. It is also not an ambitious expectation that energy cooperation might make the countries interdependent on each other, which will ultimately strengthen the relationships among the respective nations.

With the greater scope of energy cooperation, all the south Asian nations, if properly envisaged, will likely be benefited through economic development and establishing peace in this region, which ultimately will make South Asia a prosperous and peaceful area of the world. Nonetheless, what is needed is to cooperate on energy trading in a just manner so that each country could be benefited by reducing trade gap between the countries.

Monzur Hossain is a Ph.D candidate at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan.