Pakistan’s ticking population nightmare
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Pakistan is sitting on a ticking time bomb. A new UN report says Pakistan will increase its population by 56 percent to 366 million by 2050. Pakistan already holds the dubious distinction of currently being the sixth most populous country in the world without the requisite levels of economic development or political stability to manage current population levels. Without matching economic and social development this will be akin to collective suicide.
Pakistan’s already huge current population of 220 million is growing faster than most regional and Muslim countries. Between the two last censuses of 1998 and 2017, it grew at 2.4% per year. This is nearly twice faster than average doubling time for other South Asian countries. Fertility in Pakistan, at 3.6 average births per woman, is twice the levels of Iran and higher than Saudi Arabia at 2.7. Pakistan stands at about one and a half child more than other countries of its region.
Even the Pakistani prime minister concedes that such a high rate of population growth is unsustainable as it is eating into the country’s modest socio-economic development gains, making it increasingly harder to ensure basic investments in human development such as health, nutrition, education, and productive skills. Nearly a fourth of the population lives below the national poverty line and absolute numbers of the poor are increasing with population growth. Stress on the environment and natural resources is leading to faster degradation, rising vulnerability to climate change, threats to food security, and above all, a critical decline in per capita water availability.
Poverty in Pakistan has a close relation with low literacy, high fertility, high rates of childhood and maternal mortality especially among the poorest households. Approximately 60% of Pakistanis face food insecurity and nearly 50% of women and children are malnourished. Clearly the cost of a high population growth rate is too high. What can Pakistan do to manage its unsustainable runaway population?
Stress on the environment and natural resources is leading to faster degradation, rising vulnerability to climate change, threats to food security, and above all, a critical decline in per capita water availability.
Adnan Rehmat
There are several solutions rooted in the factors that lead to high growth rates. The high fertility driving growth is not completely a matter of choice. Huge numbers of couples want to space or limit births but are unable to do so due to lack of information or services. Unmet needs for family planning services is high at 17% according to a national health survey conducted in 2018.
The main barriers to contraceptive use include physical distances from delivery points, costs, social barriers, poor quality of services, and associated misperceptions. Millions of desperate women resort to induced abortions every year, often in unsafe conditions that compound maternal and child health outcomes. Low public expenditure on health, population and education are among the root causes of poor indicators on socio-economic development.
Pakistan records nine million pregnancies each year on average, of which at least four million can be avoided, according to a Ministry of Health Services, Regulations and Coordination report in 2018. Of the unwanted four million pregnancies, 1.4 million are unwanted births (through unintended pregnancies), 2.2 million induced abortions and 0.4 million miscarriages.
What can Pakistan do? Taking cognizance of the high population growth, former Chief Justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar took suo moto notice in 2018, constituting a national task force to formulate a mechanism to curb population growth. The task force came up with an action plan comprising eight broad recommendations. These recommendations have also been endorsed by the Council of Common Interests, a national statutory body that generates common ground among Pakistani provinces.
These include establishing national and provincial task forces to steer and implement critical decisions to reduce population growth, lower fertility rate and increase contraceptive prevalence; ensure universal access to family planning and reproductive health services; creating a special fund to reduce growth with an annual allocation of at least 10 billion rupees; special legislation ensuring mandatory reproductive health services, banning early child marriages and mandatory family planning counselling at the time of marriage; launching a sustainable advocacy and communication plan to promote a national narrative create a sense of urgency and necessity of reducing population growth rate and achieving socioeconomic wellbeing for all; updating the curriculum to teach hygiene and sex education in schools, colleges and universities; ensuring contraceptive access by including family planning commodities in the essential drug lists; and enlisting support of the clergy to promote the multi-faith, multi-sectarian agreement on family planning reached in 2015.
Pakistan must give birth to a modernist and collaborative approach to tackle its ballooning population nightmare. Its work is cut out for it: Pakistan must put population control at the heart of its economic development policies to ensure progress and prosperity.
- Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistan-based journalist, researcher and analyst with interests in politics, media, development and science.
Twitter: @adnanrehmat1
