38th SAARC Charter Day
The 38th SAARC Charter Day was observed on the 8th of December 2022, during the regional workshop on Urban Resilience and Making Cities Resilient, to commemorate the signing of the SAARC Charter on the 8th of December in 1985 by the leaders of the Seven South Asian Countries - Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. SAARC was joined by the Afghanistan as a Member in the month of April, 2007.
To reinforce the spirit of building resilience in the South Asian Region, a special session was organised to discuss and learn from some good practices in the realm of urban resilience and sustainability.
The panel discussion highlighted various aspects of urban resilience through deliberations on case-studies from Surat City (by Mr. Kamlesh Yagnik), GIFT City (by Mr. Rajeev Sharma) and concluded with a discussion on how sustainability is profitable (by Mr. Sameer Sinha).
Although the discussions focussed on urban resilience, the moderator (Mr. P. K. Taneja, Director – SDMC (IU)), ensured that the cited examples are looked at as initiatives with potential to be upscaled and extrapolated beyond urban boundaries.