In South Asia as a whole, the report said, “The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine has weighed on growth in the South Asia region (SAR) after a solid recovery in the second half of last year and amplified pre-existing vulnerabilities”

Indian Americans have monopolised the contest from 2008 to 2018, but in 2019 a non-Indian girl was among the eight co-winners. The other seven were of Indian origin.

During the debate, Pakistan’s Acting Permanent Representative Aamir Khan had accused India of “grave breaches of international criminal law” in Kashmir and of trying to change its demographics from Muslim majority to Hindu majority by cancelling its special constitutional status.

“The growing capabilities of terrorist and other non-State groups to access delivery systems like missiles and unmanned/uncrewed aerial systems [drones] have compounded the risks of terrorism using WMDs”, the Indian representative said.

Without naming the two countries, India’s Permanent Representative T. S. Tirumurti told the Council on March 25, “India also believes that there is a pressing need to address the proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies related to DPRK (North Korea) in our region. These linkages have an adverse impact on peace and security in the…

Tirumurti spoke of the dangers from terrorist exploitation of the new financial technologies like virtual currencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that create monetary value out of non-physical entities, crowd-funding platforms and new payment methods like prepaid phone cards, mobile payments and online payment systems

“We challenge those that worry about food security: Resolve the Kashmir dispute, open the door to peace in South Asia and watch how the farmers of Pakistan and India can feed the world”, Bhutto Zardari said

India “has never been found wanting” when it came to helping countries in distress, whether it was the Covid pandemic or conflicts. “We have provided food aid in the form of thousands of metric tonnes of wheat, rice, pulses, and lentils to several countries, including our neighbourhood and Africa, to strengthen their food security”, he said

South Asian countries faced risks from higher prices and shortages of farming inputs including fertilisers, it said. “This will probably result in weaker harvests and exert further upward pressures on food prices in the near term”, according to the WESP

India, which is the world’s second-largest wheat grower and has a big stockpile, ordered an end to most purely commercial wheat transactions, while leaving room for some exports to neighbouring countries and governments of countries in need