SAARC Regional Centres: Promoting Agriculture, Energy, Culture, and Health

When the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was founded in 1985, its charter promised something ambitious: to improve the quality of life across one of the most populous regions on earth. But broad declarations rarely change lives on their own. To turn lofty goals into concrete action, SAARC created a network of specialised institutions known as regional centres. These centres were designed as the working hands of the organisation, each focused on a specific challenge shared across the region, from feeding nearly two billion people to fighting infectious disease. Understanding how they function tells us a great deal about how regional cooperation actually works in practice, and where it struggles.

What are SAARC regional centres? 🔗

SAARC regional centres are specialised bodies set up to drive cooperation in particular sectors such as agriculture, energy, culture, and health. They act as the implementation arms of SAARC, translating the political decisions taken at summits into research, training, and shared knowledge. Each centre is hosted by a different member state and managed by a Governing Board made up of representatives from all members, the SAARC Secretary General, and the foreign ministry of the host country.

This design serves two purposes. It distributes responsibility across member states rather than concentrating institutions in one country, and it allows each centre to develop deep expertise in a single field. The result is a system where specialised focus and shared regional ownership are meant to reinforce each other.

A network that has changed over time 🔗

An important point that many study materials miss: SAARC once operated as many as eleven regional centres, but that number has been reduced. At the 18th SAARC Summit in Kathmandu in 2014, member states decided to close three centres and merge four others to cut costs and avoid duplication of work. The Information Centre, the Human Resource Development Centre, and the Documentation Centre were shut down, with their mandates transferred to the SAARC Secretariat. Meanwhile, the Forestry Centre, Disaster Management Centre, Coastal Zone Management Centre, and Meteorological Research Centre were slated to merge into a single environment and disaster body.

This matters because the older list of centres still circulates widely, including the standalone SAARC Disaster Management Centre (SDMC) in Delhi. As a topic of study, the SDMC remains relevant for understanding disaster risk reduction in the region, but it is worth knowing that its functions were folded into a reorganised structure. The centres that have continued operating most consistently are those covering agriculture, energy, culture, and tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. We will look at each in turn.

The SAARC Agriculture Centre: feeding the region 🔗

Located in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the SAARC Agriculture Centre (SAC) is the oldest of all the regional centres. It was established in 1988 as the SAARC Agricultural Information Centre and renamed in 2007. Agriculture is the natural starting point for regional cooperation here, because it employs a huge share of the South Asian workforce and remains central to food security for the region’s enormous population.

The centre is headed by a Director from the host country and staffed by Senior Programme Specialists recruited from across the member states, covering themes like crops, horticulture, livestock, fisheries, and natural resource management. Its core objectives, as set out by the centre itself, include strengthening agricultural research and accelerating technology transfer through regional networks of research institutes and extension services.

How the Agriculture Centre works in practice 🔗

The SAC focuses on a few practical areas. Technology transfer is a cornerstone activity, where successful methods developed in one country are adapted for use in others facing similar conditions. Knowledge dissemination involves publishing journals, bulletins, and research reports, and maintaining databases that agricultural workers across the region can access. The centre also provides policy inputs to ministerial-level meetings and runs capacity-building programmes such as training sessions and expert consultations.

A concrete example is the centre’s work on safe food production. It has organised regional training on poultry production and management, bringing together focal experts from member states to improve nutrition, generate income for rural households, and reduce economic vulnerability. The SAC also hosts the information system for the SAARC Food Bank, a regional reserve mechanism designed to help member states cope with food shortages.

The SAARC Energy Centre: powering cooperation 🔗

Energy is one of the most strategically sensitive areas of regional cooperation, and also one of the most promising. The SAARC Energy Centre (SEC) was created through the Dhaka Declaration in 2005 and began functioning in Islamabad, Pakistan, in March 2006. Its founding vision was striking: to build an “Energy Ring” across South Asia where electricity and natural gas could flow more freely between countries.

The logic is sound. Some member states have surplus hydropower potential, while others face chronic shortages. A connected regional grid could, in principle, balance supply and demand far more efficiently than each country acting alone. The centre’s stated objectives include facilitating energy trade through a regional electricity grid and gas pipelines, promoting more efficient energy use, and expanding the use of renewable and alternative energy sources.

The work and the obstacles 🔗

In practice, the SEC operates as a platform bringing together officials, experts, academics, and environmental organisations. It produces technical studies on issues like cross-border electricity pricing, mini-grids for rural electrification, and the solarisation of streetlights. It also provides technical inputs to SAARC working groups on energy.

A major milestone came at the 18th Summit in 2014, when SAARC leaders welcomed the Framework Agreement for Energy Cooperation (Electricity), a treaty intended to enable cross-border power trade. Yet energy cooperation also reveals the limits of the SAARC model. Progress on the Energy Ring has been slow, and much of the meaningful electricity trade in the region has happened through bilateral arrangements and sub-regional groupings rather than the full SAARC framework. This gap between vision and delivery is a recurring theme across the centres.

The SAARC Cultural Centre: building a shared identity 🔗

Not all cooperation is about economics. The SAARC Cultural Centre (SCC) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, works on something less tangible but arguably just as important: a sense of shared regional identity. The decision to create it was taken at the 10th SAARC Summit held in Colombo in 1998, where leaders recognised that South Asia, despite its enormous diversity, shares a deep “civilizational continuum” that could strengthen ties between its peoples.

The centre’s mandate is to promote regional unity through cultural integration and inter-cultural dialogue, while contributing to the preservation and protection of South Asia’s cultural heritage. Its scope is broad, covering performing arts, visual and fine arts, archaeology, literature, folklore, poetry, and diminishing traditional art forms.

Culture as a tool of diplomacy 🔗

The SCC runs a busy calendar of activities. These include film festivals, artist camps, research seminars, and lecture series that connect creators and scholars across borders. It has organised children’s literary festivals celebrating South Asian folktales, puppetry workshops preserving traditional storytelling, and exhibitions of regional art.

This kind of cultural diplomacy has a strategic dimension. In a region where political relations can be tense, cultural exchange offers a relatively low-risk way to keep dialogue alive and remind citizens of what they have in common. When formal political cooperation stalls, people-to-people and cultural connections often become the most durable threads holding regional engagement together.

The SAARC Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS Centre: a shared health response 🔗

Diseases do not respect national borders, which makes health one of the clearest cases for regional cooperation. The SAARC Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS Centre (STAC) in Kathmandu, Nepal, addresses two of the most serious public health threats in South Asia. It began as the SAARC Tuberculosis Centre, established in 1992 and operational from 1994. In 2005, recognising the overlap between tuberculosis and HIV infection, member states approved renaming it to reflect the dual focus.

The centre’s core objective is to work for the prevention and control of TB and HIV/AIDS by coordinating the national programmes of the member states. Rather than running treatment programmes itself, STAC functions as a coordinating and technical-support body, offering evidence-based policy guidance to the countries that actually deliver care.

What STAC does on the ground 🔗

STAC’s activities include organising trainings, workshops, and seminars, conducting research on TB and HIV/AIDS, and publishing epidemiological reports, journals, and newsletters. It has developed region-wide strategies, such as a regional plan aimed at reducing the disease burden of tuberculosis in line with global elimination targets. The centre also maintains a reference laboratory and serves as a resource hub, and there have been efforts to upgrade its laboratory facilities into a higher-grade regional testing centre.

The value of this coordination is significant. Tuberculosis remains a leading cause of death in parts of the region, and drug-resistant strains pose a cross-border risk that no single country can manage alone. By harmonising guidelines and sharing research, STAC helps member states respond to a problem that is genuinely shared.

Why the regional centres matter, and where they fall short 🔗

Taken together, the regional centres represent the most practical face of SAARC. While summits make headlines, it is these institutions that carry out the slow, technical work of cooperation: training a poultry farmer, drafting an energy study, preserving a folk tradition, or harmonising a treatment guideline. They embody the idea that countries gain more by pooling expertise than by working in isolation.

Yet the centres also mirror SAARC’s broader difficulties. The reduction from eleven centres to a smaller number reflects concerns about duplication, cost, and limited output. Political tensions between member states, especially the recurring freeze in the SAARC process itself, have slowed many initiatives and left several promising frameworks underused. The centres often produce excellent research and recommendations, but turning those into region-wide action depends on political will that has frequently been in short supply.

Still, their continued operation through difficult periods is telling. Even when high-level political cooperation falters, the technical and cultural work of these centres tends to continue, quietly keeping the machinery of regional engagement running.

What do you think? If regional centres can keep functioning even when political relations between member states break down, does that make them the most realistic foundation for South Asian cooperation, or simply a way of avoiding the harder political questions? And which sector, agriculture, energy, culture, or health, do you think offers the best chance for genuine regional integration in the years ahead?

References

1. https://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/saarc1.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAARC_Documentation_Centre
3. https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/three-saarc-regional-centres-shut-116011100908_1.html
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAARC_Agriculture_Centre
5. https://slideplayer.com/slide/14369099/
6. https://www.saarcenergy.org/about-us/
7. https://www.saarcenergy.org/vision-mission/
8. https://saarcculture.org/saarc-cultural-centre-mandate/
9. https://saarcculture.org/
10. https://www.saarc-sec.org/index.php/press-release/321-thirteenth-meeting-of-the-governing-board-of-the-saarc-cultural-centre-colombo-sri-lanka-28-29-november-2023
11. https://www.saarctb.org/saarc-tb-and-hivaids-centre/
12. https://www.aidsdatahub.org/resource/saarc-regional-strategy-control-elimination-tuberculosis-2013-2017