BIPS, Games, and Puzzles
By Anjum Altaf ‘BIPS’ refers to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – the most populous countries in South Asia. ‘Games’ refers to the Commonwealth Games, the last of which concluded on the weekend in Glasgow. ‘Puzzles’ refers to the intriguing questions revealed by the Games about BIPS. The specific puzzle we explore in this post is why the performance of Indian women is so much better than that of the other countries when the human development indicators of India are fairly similar to Bangladesh and Pakistan and actually much worse than those of Sri Lanka. For the sake of reference, the human development indicators as presented by Jean Dreze Amartya Sen are shown in the following table. At one level this post is a straightforward update of two earlier posts that had crafted a narrative from the results of the Commonwealth games up to 2010. The first, Pakistan: Falling Off...