There is a quiet shift happening across South Asia that rarely makes headlines, but may ultimately matter more than any regional summit or bilateral trade agreement. A new generation of leaders – sons and daughters of the political dynasties, business empires, and civic institutions that have long defined the region’s power structures – is beginning to step out of the shadows and into the mainstream. They have been joined by the youth, students and GenZees of the region.
These NextGen leaders are in their mid-thirties to mid-forties now. Some are advisors to the Prime Ministers, while others are Prime Ministers and Ministers themselves. Others run think tanks, lead multibillion-dollar business houses, lead chambers of commerce, or build tech startups reshaping their countries’ economies. And increasingly, they are asking a question their predecessors rarely found time for: Why is South Asia so broken? Why can’t we be advanced economies? Why are we still so divided?
South Asia is, by almost any measure, the least economically integrated region on earth. It is home to two billion people – for context, 25% of the world population resides in just 2.5% of the countries of the world, which comprise South Asia. The South Asian cultures have been part of the same mosaic for thousands of years – shared languages, shared cuisine, shared literary traditions, shared colonial bondage and shared traumas. And yet intra-regional trade as a share of total trade hovers somewhere around five per cent – a fraction of what comparable regions manage.
A Pakistani entrepreneur, a Bangladeshi tech innovator and an Indian AI venture capitalist likely have more in common — in worldview, in aspiration, in the problems they are trying to solve – than either does with their own country’s political establishment of twenty years ago.
The reasons are well-documented: colonial-era border politics hardened into national identity, geopolitical rivalries institutionalised into foreign policy, and a diplomatic culture that has too often defined success as keeping the other side out rather than letting prosperity in. The legacy leadership on all sides has, with notable exceptions, been more vested in managing these tensions than resolving them.
What makes this next generation different is not just age, it is their orientation. They have studied together, travelled together, and in many cases built professional networks across borders that the formal diplomatic architecture still struggles to accommodate. A Pakistani entrepreneur, a Bangladeshi tech innovator and an Indian AI venture capitalist likely have more in common – in worldview, in aspiration, in the problems they are trying to solve – than either does with their own country’s political establishment of twenty years ago. That shared orientation is an asset that no one has yet figured out how to systematically cultivate.
To do exactly that, there is an effort underway to facilitate a forum of “NextGen Leaders”. This is an attempt to build a durable, structured platform that brings these individuals together not around the flashpoints that divide their governments, but around the practical challenges and opportunities that require collective action to address. Digital public infrastructure. AI in health systems. Financial inclusion and cross-border payment networks. Regional mobility and connectivity. These are not soft topics, but rather the building blocks of the integrated regional economy that South Asia has never quite managed to construct.
What makes this initiative structurally different from the well-intentioned Track II dialogues that have proliferated over the decades is the deliberate focus on the pipeline rather than the platform. Traditional policy interventions are inevitably hostage to political cycles – a change of government, a border incident, an election that reshuffles priorities. The bet here is generational. By building peer networks and providing genuine international exposure to the individuals who will be/are running governments, central banks, and major institutions across the region over the next two decades, the aim is to embed long-term cooperative instincts deeply enough that they survive the inevitable disruptions of short-term politics.
The diaspora dimension adds another layer of strategic value. Millions of South Asians are now embedded in global professional networks – in finance, technology, medicine, policy – and many are actively looking for ways to reconnect with the countries they left or their parents left. Bringing them into these networks, rather than treating them as outside observers, multiplies the reach and sophistication of what can be built.
None of this is naïve about the obstacles. Cross-border politics in South Asia can be acutely sensitive, and institutional caution runs deep. The operational design of the Forum reflects this – using neutral international venues and hybrid formats precisely because the goal is not to replicate official diplomacy but to create a protected space for the kind of candid relationship-building that official diplomacy rarely allows. You do not resolve a generation of mistrust in a single conference room. You build the personal relationships and, more importantly, business alliances that override historic mistrust.
The deeper argument here is a simple one. South Asia’s next chapter will not be written by the leaders who spent careers managing division, or worse, exploiting divisions. It will be written by the generation that grew up close enough to the old boundaries to understand them, but far enough from the original wounds to imagine something different. What they need is not more platforms for symbolic dialogue. They need structured, sustained, high-quality exposure to each other – and to the global networks that can amplify what they are capable of building together.
That moment is closer than it looks. The question is whether the institutions and donors who care about South Asia’s long-term trajectory are willing to invest in it before the window narrows again.
The writer is a Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council