Karachi Chronicle: Population time bomb ticking

Call it Family Planning, Birth Control or Population Welfare Department, it has not made an iota of difference to the population boom in nearly 40 years of its existence since the Ayub Khan era. This department was one of the first serious reporting assignments of my career; it also involved visiting maternity homes and covering baby shows. Its aim was to encourage couples to procreate only two children. The logo, still in use, shows the ideal family of father, mother, a boy who seems about four-years-old, stands between the parents and there is a baby, whose sex you cannot tell from the picture, on the mother's lap.
That logo and a few ridiculous slogans in English, Urdu and regional languages were released from time to time. Currently, the department has shown it is still existing by posting half-page advertisements in newspapers in which grim-faced religious scholars and a popular TV channel chief endorse natural spacing in birth of children. This natural spacing is achieved by breast feeding the baby for at least three years. A woman does not get pregnant as long as she breast-feeds her baby.
Then, as now, breast feeding has been the only form of birth control acceptable to all segments of society, from the ulema to the illiterate villager. You would think less children would be born in the rural areas, but that is not a fact. The reason is the poor health of women who cannot produce enough milk to feed the baby and soon turn to goat's milk when their natural milk dries up. Our agricultural sector has therefore the highest birth rate. It is well known a rural woman has at least ten pregnancies in her productive age. Some children survive birth but the death rate is high. Which means there is no demand on the mother's milk and a woman soon becomes pregnant again. One slogan of this department therefore was 'For the health of mother and child, less children means a happy healthy family.'
In the urban sector, which also includes feudal-minded landowners, there is awareness that an ideal family should have two children, but the awareness does not translate into actual commitment. If the first two children happen to be girls, the couple will try a third time hoping for a male child. If the third is also a girl they will try again, and again and again. That is how the birth rate sky rockets.
In the urban sector, birth control pills were introduced by the department. It also vaguely talked about vasectomy (tube tying in males) but were afraid to promote it, probably because across the border Mrs Gandhi's 'nas-bandi' mass movement had caused untold misery to the poor, and political unpopularity of the PM. They asked lady doctors to 'quietly suggest' hysterectomy (surgical removal of the womb) and other methods of artificial birth control from pills to uterine insertions. None of these methods was openly promoted for fear of backlash from the whole Muslim society.
In short, for four decades the department has been beating round the bush, or going round and round the mulberry tree; you get the picture? To bring down the birth rate in Pakistan is essential for economic progress but none of the methods work. The department's success rate is zero. Asia is the most fecund continent and everywhere nations who wanted to modernise adopted measures of birth control as a national policy. Some methods were harsh. China's one-child restriction for example. But they yielded results. In Pakistan no method will work and their will never be a national policy. The Population Welfare Department is just a token of government concern, not policy.
So will we never succeed in bringing down Pakistan's birth rate? Of course we can, but it needs thinking outside the box. Focus on policies which bring prosperity to the masses. Which means more industry more business and commerce including other wealth-generating services form medicine to IT. Take the case of expats and those Pakistanis who have become citizens of developed countries like the UK, USA etc. These Pakistani-origin folk do not as a rule have large families. The norm is one child per couple, or perhaps two. They earn well, they have goals which can be fulfilled through their money, insurance policy, tax returns and the government's own welfare programmes. It makes life worth living. So you do not really need birth control methods to bring down the birth rate.