International Journal of South Asian Studies

The SAARC’s strategic social engineering, when seen in a historical context, and examined from numerous social declarations, meetings and actual ground works, provides a pattern of development planning that appears to have some tangible work in various fields in human development in South Asia. Following a postmodern approach in analysis, this study argues that each culture has its own standard for judging human development, claiming that the claim for the universality of reason is ethnocentric in that it privileges a Western view of the development while discounting other processes. An eventual argument is developed to affirm that within SAARC, the principle of social justice has come to dominate over the ideal of social protection.