South Asia State of Minorities Report 2024: Economic, Political and Social Participation and Representation of Minorities

What This Report Is

The South Asia Collective, a coalition of human rights groups from seven countries, published this 420-page report in 2024. It covers how minorities are treated across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The organization calls the report “a tool for advocacy.”

What We Looked At

How a study is done determines whether you can trust what it found. CID scores methodology (how the research was done), not conclusions (what the research found). We classified this report as an Advocacy Document, which means it advances a stated policy position. That classification changes how we score it. Two dimensions (which measure specific aspects of methodology) do not apply to advocacy documents: Classification Rigor and Case Capture. The remaining six dimensions carry the full weight of the score.

What We Found

Sourcing is the report’s most visible weakness. We scored Source Independence (which measures whether a report’s evidence comes from truly separate origins) at 4 out of 10. Of 1,538 citations, 84 percent came from advocacy organizations or non-academic outlets. Academic research accounted for 13 citations total. That is less than 1 percent. When nearly all of your sources share your mission, independent confirmation becomes hard to tell apart from repetition.

The report’s numbers are hard to check. We scored Verification Standards (which measures whether an outsider can confirm the report’s claims) at 4 out of 10. The report cites 1,538 sources across 242 websites — the largest citation count in our scored corpus. Volume is not the problem. What sits beneath it is. Sixty-four percent of the report’s statistical claims have missing or unclear denominators (the base number that gives a percentage meaning). The report includes expert surveys from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal. None publish the survey questions, the expert selection criteria, or the data processing method. One survey reports that 95 percent of respondents feel minority voices are inadequately represented. We cannot evaluate that claim because we cannot see the instrument that produced it.

Eight annual editions and not one limitations section. We scored Counter-Evidence (which measures whether a report acknowledges what it cannot prove) at 3 out of 10. This is a 420-page document covering seven countries. The South Asia Collective has published eight editions since 2016. None contains a section explaining the report’s limitations. A corrections policy exists — a positive signal. But eight years of publication with zero acknowledged limitations does not indicate a flawless method. It indicates that self-assessment is not happening.

Regional scope is the report’s strongest feature. We scored Coverage Symmetry (which measures whether a report’s coverage matches its stated mission) at 5 out of 10. Most reports in this space focus on one country and one direction. This report covers Hindu minorities in Pakistan, Muslim minorities in India, Tamil minorities in Sri Lanka, and Christian minorities across the region. That structure creates natural balance no single-country report can match. The score stops at 5 because the balance breaks down inside each country chapter. In the India chapter, every minority group appears almost exclusively as a victim. No chapter examines cases where minority groups act as agents rather than targets.

The Bottom Line

This report scored 4.19 out of 10. That places it in the Deficient band (scores from 4.0 to 5.9). Deficient means significant gaps in methodology (how the research was done) weaken the report’s reliability as independent research. No non-compensatory cap (an automatic score limit triggered by failure on a key dimension) was applied. The grade held steady under three different ways of weighting the dimensions — not a borderline case. The score reflects methodology only. The report’s conclusions about minority persecution in South Asia may be correct even though its published methods have gaps.