A New Plan for the Colombo Plan

After suffering a near-death experience, the Colombo Plan is in the throes of a Japanese-initiated rejuvenation effort. The goal: to turn the organisation into a pan-Asian agency that can help the region´s poorer countries benefit from the experience of the economic tigers of the East. For decades, The Colombo Plan was a household word across Asia. "Going on a Plan" had come to mean winning a prestigious scholarship to a foreign university. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Nepalis benefited from the Plan, earning degrees mainly in civil engineering, business management, urban planning or economics. Plan alumni today are in senior echelons from Malaysia to Pakistan.

By the 1990s, the Colombo Plan had slipped into obscurity. Even today, its two-storey, tile-roofed secretariat on a bylane in the Sri Lankan capital has the ambience of a sleepy backwater. Inside, fading photographs of stern-faced past directors adorn the walls. Across the city near the Colombo town hall, a granite obelisk marks the meeting in 1950 that launched the organisation called, rather lengthily, The Colombo Plan for the Economic and Social Development of South Asia and Southeast Asia.

But those were ambitiously optimistic times. The Second World War was just over, Asian countries were emerging out of colonialism, and the Cold War was already freezing up. Leaders and ministers of the British Commonwealth, including Jawaharlal Nehru, J.R. Jayawardene and Ghulam Mohammed, decided that Asia needed something like the Marshall Plan that had just helped rebuild Europe after the ravages of war. The Colombo Plan, which resulted from these deliberations, was the first multilateral effort in foreign aid in Asia. The key donor countries were Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the United States, and the organisation included Asian members of the Commonwealth like India, Ceylon and Pakistan.

By the late 1950s, membership had expanded to include non-Commonwealth nations like Thailand, Nepal, Indonesia, Laos, South Korea, Iran and Afghanistan. For the next decades, the Colombo Plan helped Asian developing countries with thousands of development projects, skills training, and scholarships. In three decades, a staggering 350,000 students had gone on the "Plan".

Gracious Retirement
Over time, the Colombo Plan´s role was duplicated and then eclipsed by the better-endowed bilateral assistance programmes and sectoral multilateral aid agencies such as UNDP, the Bangkok-based Economic Commission for the Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Regional groupings like ASEAN and SAARC diverted people´s minds off the Colombo Plan and its mandate. And as East Asia began to prosper, there was less and less need there for outside help in technical training.

Britain and Canada lost interest in the Plan and pulled out, funding started to dip, and, by the mid-1980s, the organisation teetered on the brink of extinction. At a meeting called in 1989, a delegate from one of the remaining donors diplomatically suggested that the organisation should consider "retiring graciously from the international scene".

But, in a move that also symbolises the shift in the world´s economic epicentre, the East Asians decided to step in and revive the organisation. Japan and Korea, which were once beneficiaries of the Plan, began pumping in money to revitalise the organisation. The strongest indication of the East Asian interest in the Colombo Plan was the appointment in 1995 of South Korean economist, Hak-Su Kim, as the new Secretary General. A former UNDP official who worked on developing the Tumen Basin of northeast Asia, Mr Hak is uniquely qualified for the post and is determined to take the Colombo Plan out of the doldrums. He is already working on changing the agency´s constitution, preparing an interim strategy to take it up to the year 2000, tapping new funding sources, and planning for a new, bigger, secretariat building in Colombo.

"We are in transition," Mr Hak says."We want to see how the industrialised countries of the Far East, the newly-industrialised Southeast Asian countries, and states of the South Asian region can learn from each other." He believes the Colombo Plan is the ideal agency for a new age in pan-Asian cooperation in training, technological knowhow and information exchange. The Secretary General feels there is a lot South Asian countries can learn in development strategy and planning from countries like Malaysia and Singapore, and is promoting a project to get the two countries to sponsor training for the Subcontinent´s planners and development strategists.

The prime mover of the rejuvenated Colombo Plan is Japan, and the idea of greater inter-Asian cooperation is a concept dear to aid bureaucrats in Tokyo. Japan would also like other well-to-do member countries like Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to be more active members. "Japan has a very strong attachment to the Colombo Plan and is strongly behind the Plan´s revitalisation," says Mr Hak.

Tokyo appears to have sentimental reasons to return to the Colombo Plan. When it joined as a member in 1954, its post-war rehabilitation was in full swing back home. Japan became a donor nation for the first time in 1954 when it provided small grants for technical assistance under the Colombo Plan to developing Asia.

Each Colombo Plan country pays a membership due of USD 11,700 per year; in addition, countries make voluntary grants to their favourite projects. Despite the East Asian rescue effort, the Colombo Plan´s budget does not match its mandate or the immensity of the challenges of technical cooperation in the Asia-Pacific.

Tiger Economies
The revitalisation plan, approved at a meeting in Seoul in 1994, sought to make the Colombo Plan a primary agency for South-South cooperation within Asia for exchange of technical expertise. Most East Asian members of the Colombo Plan have now become tiger economies themselves and no more need aid. So the Plan has decided to focus on the most vulnerable countries: the least developed, the landlocked, tiny island states, and the "transition economies" of Indochina.

Japan´s support has gone to a programme to upgrade public administration skills in cooperation with the Tokyo-based Asian Productivity Organisation (APO). South Korea is helping with a programme to develop the private sector in Asian developing countries—especially for small- and medium-scale enterprises. The United States and Japan are continuing to support the Colombo Plan´s advisory programme for drugs, which coordinates regionwide efforts to reduce supply of and demand for narcotics in Asia.

The Colombo Plan will soon be 50 years old, and its history reflects the changing fortunes of empires in the second half of this century. The sun has set on the Commonwealth that gave birth to it, the Americans have come and gone, and the torch has been passed on to the Asia-Pacific. The East Asians plan to take the Colombo Plan out of intensive care, but a lot more needs to be done to find the organisation a new niche. Mr Hak seems to be on the right track: using the Colombo Plan to get newly-prosperous Asians to show less prosperous Asians how they did it.