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Indo-Pak nuke race is alarming: UNDP

South Asia has become one of the most militarised and poorest regions in the world, a situation that is aggravated by the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, the UN Development Programme has said in a study on human development in the region.

The region, which comprises Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, is home to 500 million people living in poverty or on one dollar a day under a World Bank estimate. That number is about half of the world's 1.3 billion poor people.

The UN agency said in a study that one in two South Asians is illiterate, one in five lacks access to safe water and health services, one in two children under five is malnourished and four out of five have no access to financial services.

But the agency said the ''alarming development for South Asia is the open nuclearisation of an already vulnerable and volatile region''.

Military budgets in both India and Pakistan are projected to increase ''considerably'' as the two countries are trying to fully upgrade their nuclear weapons. The per capita income in each country is under 500 dollars.

''The implications for promoting human security and human development in South Asia are disturbing,'' the study said.

Nuclearisation programmes have taken priority over concerns for human security, income and employment, the environment and crimes in the two countries, the agency said.

The agency said any nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan will affect the whole region, from Nepal to Sri Lanka to the Maldives. It has not only the potential of killing a large number of people, but also of the radioactive consequences in the whole region.

It said the United States and the former Soviet Union, because of the great distance separating them, could have a 20-minute to 25- minute warning time to react to a nuclear attack from one side to the other. But India and Pakistan are neighbours and would have less than three minutes to react to such an attack.

UNI

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