Pakistan’s estimated population, according to the National Institute of Population Studies (NIPS), is 215.25 million with officially estimated growth rate of 1.80 percent (2020) and density of 270 per Km2.
Pakistan, being the 5th most populous country and having 9th largest labour force in the world, adds a large number to its labour force every year.
The country has limited resources and its increasing population is putting more pressure on these resources. Rapidly growing population has direct negative implications for adverse climate change, environment degradation, deforestation and above all the decline in water availability per capita. It will exacerbate food security and threaten the country’s sustainable development prospects. As a consequence of faster growth rate currently, the very fabric of our society is facing a serious threat with the writ of the state seemingly vanishing rapidly.
The government is being seen trying to overcome the problem of high population growth and fertility rates through different programmes like media campaign, establishment of Family Welfare Centres (FWCs), Reproductive Health Services Centers (RHSCs), Regional Training Institutes and Mobile Services Unit.
A Federal Task Force (FTF) was established to promote public-private partnership among all stakeholders in population-related activities and encourage corporate social responsibility projects by the corporate sector.
The report of the task force constituted earlier by the Supreme Court and submitted on October 30, 2018 had stated that Pakistan is the sixth (now it is fifth) most populous country in the world. According to rough estimates, Pakistan’s population will be doubled in the next 30 years. We, therefore, urgently need to reduce the growth rate to 1.5% and fertility rate to around 3%.
The report recommended establishing national and provincial task forces to provide oversights and take critical decisions to reduce population growth, lower fertility rate and increase contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR). The report also recommended mandating all public health facilities are to deliver family planning services as part of the essential service package, all general registered private sector practitioners and hospitals to provide family planning counselling, information and services to male and female clients. It also proposed providing training to lady health workers to provide family planning, ante-natal and post-natal counselling, and contraception services on a priority basis.
The federal government has been directed to create a five-year non-lapsable special fund for reducing population growth rate. The fund is to be set up exclusively from federal resources without any cut from provincial funds.
Right to promote primary healthcare for mother and child has been made mandatory as the right to education given in Article 25-A of Constitution.
Mass movement leading to a call of action is to be launched involving political leaders, corporate sector, academia, judiciary, executive, Ulema, media, intelligentsia, civil society and youth.
Since the official efforts have remained, over the last five decades or so, largely too insignificant and timid it is not possible for one not to doubt the official estimates of population growth rates and give more credence to the unofficial ones which estimate the population growth rate at 2.4 per cent and the fertility rate per woman at 4.5.
Around the time operation Zarb-e-Azb was being launched, the population of North Waziristan was officially estimated at no more than 700,000. But the number of displaced persons that arrived at the internally displaced persons’ camps had exceeded one million by the second week of the military campaign. This is an abnormally large percentage of error between the official estimate of the population in this minuscule part of the country and the actual number. Just imagine, the horrendous possibilities that we would be facing if it were to transpire at some future date that a similar percentage of error had already rendered the official estimates of the country’s population by say more than 20 million. If true, this would in turn render inaccurate in the same vast degree every important official statistic based on which our officials are making plans for meeting our current and future demands for our basic and not so basic needs.
That is why most of our annual budgets and mid-term socio-economic plans framed on the basis of wrong numbers of mouths to feed, bodies to clothe and persons to house have ended up adding a huge backlog to these numbers and kept expanding the sea of poverty by the day.
And that is why while the national economy as a result is going down the drain, maternity homes are said to be going up on the list of most lucrative business enterprises in Pakistan. Not that we should stop setting up more maternity homes. In fact, considering the apathetic state of mother and child care in this country, we do need more and more maternity homes, especially in rural Pakistan. Of course, not for bringing in more mouths to feed, clothe and house but to take good care of post-natal health of the mother and child. And also to save the new born from polio and save the mother, by providing her the right counsel for spacing and limiting, from becoming a child-bearing machine.
The Population Council of Pakistan has estimated that only 35.4% of women in the country are currently practising contraception and that more than 20% of married women want to practice contraception to space out birth or limit their family size but are unable to do so. This is mainly because of widespread illiteracy, cultural taboos and inaccessibility to high quality family planning or birth spacing services.
Also, there appears to be some kind of aversion on the part of successive governments since General Zia’s days towards population planning. This needs to be reversed, with the current government and its successors making a commitment to treat this matter as number one priority of the nation, following up with putting in place a strong family planning programme and increasing contraceptive prevalence rates.
It is not possible not to agree with the notion that the government officials do not talk openly about population planning or contraceptives for fear of being hounded as anti-Islam. Pakistan is currently reproducing at a rate that has upped it as the fifth largest populated country, yet we seem to be doing not enough to limit the seeming population explosion.
Called the Population Welfare Department, the replacement was named presumably to suit our ‘cultural sensitivities’. The name implicitly suggests welfare for Pakistanis is possible irrespective of the population count. Also, officially, we try to keep under wraps how the human species propagate because we fear making it an open secret would somehow adversely impact our cultural sensitivities. As someone said, presumably, the morals of Pakistani society will be wrecked if we discover how babies are made. Somehow it’s okay to breed like rabbits but not okay to know how rabbits breed.
Due consideration should also be given to the sensible suggestion that the population planning department should be merged with the health ministry or alternatively perhaps a separate ministry should be up set up solely looking after population planning.
And all private maternity homes and clinics, as well as all big private hospitals, should compulsorily set up a population planning unit on their premises.
Education and health are considered to be the two most important ingredients for enriching the quality of an individual’s life. That is why developed societies spend so much on health and education. And these two social instruments also contribute decisively towards spreading awareness about affordable size of the family and how to use healthcare to keep it within the limits of the resources available to maintain an acceptable quality of life.
Neglecting to keep the population growth rate and fertility rate per woman within reasonable limits is likely to cause, perhaps within a decade or so, for the numbers of mouths to feed, clothe and house to overtake the country’s ability to produce enough and end up sooner than later into a security disaster of gigantic proportions.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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