The impact of globalization on education in general and higher education of South Asia in particular, could be found in Human Development Report and SDGs of the United Nations. Moreover, privatization of higher education, annulment of annual system and introduction of semester system of education, and establishing accreditation council and taking quality assurance initiatives for higher education, have also been caused by the impact of globalisation. Besides, the importance of higher education has been gradually increasing in South Asian countries.
The education scenario of South Asian countries has been marred by political rivalry, natural disasters, conflict and obvious lack of health, infrastructure and labour markets. For this reason, higher education competes with other areas for funding and the governments struggle to allocate due respect to this area.
Moreover, as part of the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes during the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank pressured South Asian governments to prioritise primary and secondary education at the expense of higher education. On the other hand, universal primary education was one of the MDGs.
It is also observed that foreign donors were mostly interested in primary and secondary education and thus higher education suffers. However, unlike previous agendas—such as the MDGs and Education for All-the SDGs explicitly refer to higher education as part of the vision for lifelong learning for all.  
Higher education plays a vital role in teacher training and other aspects of educational development, as International Association of Universities (IAU) has been underlining, but more than that it can contribute to the advancement of all other goals, spanning health, gender equality, water and sanitation as well as industry and innovation. Implementation of these goals and the goals of SDGs can bring better human development situation in South Asia.
Mentionably, on the basis of the indicators of education, health and income, the UNDP has been publishing yearly human development report of the member countries since 1990. It would be relevant to discuss the human development situation of South Asian countries.
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has published Human Development Report (HDR) 2016. Based on the achievement of individual countries’ education, health and income countries have been categorised into ‘very high human development’, ‘high human development’, ‘medium human development’, and ‘low human development’.
Table 3 depicts the human development situation of South Asian countries. None of the South Asian countries has been able to achieve the scores for ‘very high human development’ quality. It indicates that even though the countries of South Asia recently have emphasised on education vis-a-vis higher education, the result of such action could not be found immediately.
On the other hand, as we have mentioned earlier, even after completion of MDGs, the human development situation, are not same in eight south Asian countries, Two countries, SriLanka and Maldives have been able to achieve high human development, five countries India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan are medium human development and only one, Afghanistan has low human development.  
It is to be noted that the better human development achieving countries have also more ‘expected years of schooling’.

The writer is the Chairman, Department of Political Science and Director, South Asian Study Circle, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.