The Strategic Foresight Group (SFG) has in a study said that Nepal and Pakistan, India's two immediate neighbours have always concentrated on enriching themselves when the military or the monarchy was in power

The SFG has in its latest report, "The Second Freedom- South Asian Challenge 2005-2025, said that Pakistan's economic life always improved whenever its military leaders secured external aid or exported manpower.

The report under the heading "His Majesty, His Military" has however said that it deteriorated whenever its external respiratory system got loose.

"So long as these two institutions dominate the two countries, the rest of the population, except the small charmed circles around the monarchy and military, can be certain of gradual impoverishment. Economic democracy does not matter," The News quoted the report as saying.

It has said that at the current state of human development, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh were almost 30 years behind their East Asian neighbours, adding the informal trade in the sub-continent was under the spell of the smugglers

The report said that of the US two billion dollars informal trade between India and Pakistan, almost half was traded through third countries like Dubai, Central Asia and Afghanistan, with the rest being trough the cross border informal trade.

It has said that while Pakistan and Nepal was under the spell of military and monarchy, India and Bangladesh had bureaucratic systems, which could sound the death knell for the industrial growths in the two countries.

"India and Bangladesh it appears do not need the monarchy or military to distort the economy. They have bureaucrats, who can inspect, arrest, squeeze entrepreneurs and kill their entrepreneurial sprit. India's inspection Raj will deliver an opportunity loss of US 2,000 billion dollars in missed industrial growth over the next two decades," the report added. (ANI)