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least to make them feel temporarily at home by eg offering them jobs and providing medical attention and other amenities. It may be that these were show-camps and that the general standard is somewhat lower. Even so the authorities concerned have obviously done a good job in preventing what, with less careful handling, could have been an explosive situation.
Conclusions
Medica
16. My overall impression was of a region which had made appreciable economic progress since last I visited it a decade and a half ago and this was after making due reservations (eg over the miseries of the poor in India and elsewhere). The progress is, of course, uneven as between the various countries, and in each country as between the capitals and the rest and between the towns and the countryside. services have been improved (for example, an anti-cholera hospital I visited in Bangladesh had quite a proportion of its beds empty a tribute to the success of prophylactic measures). Transport and communications are much more highly developed. In some places they are as sophisticated as anywhere in the world, in others the horse, the ox, the buffalo, the donkey and the camel still have their part to play. Tourism is now widely developed and appears to have almost limitless scope.
On two sectors, however, there seems to have been little or no progress. Corruption is as widespread and deep-rooted as ever it was and nobody seems to have any idea how it could be reduced. And democracy, as we know it in the West, remains an admired principle rather than a political reality.
17. These flaws notwithstanding, there seems to be no reason why, given reasonably stable conditions, these countries should not continue to maintain the steady economic progress of recent years. Whether the time will ever come when the weight of world economic activity might shift to Asia in view of its immense and growing populations
is a more controversial question. To the traveller in 1981, however, that day seems, at best, distant. Even if it were ever to arrive, there must be doubts whether the Asian countries could achieve greater
unity in international affairs, so diverse are their backgrounds,
Whether this would be to the benefit or
beliefs and loyalties.
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/detriment
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