Daily Times

The population planning process in Pakistan is based on a faulty framework and population explosion may become a threat to very existence of nation as there will be 342 million people in Pakistan by 2050, said Malir University of Science and Technology Vice Chancellor Dr Mehtab Karim.

He was speaking during an event titled ‘Is Population Bomb Ticking’ organised by Society for Global Moderation (SGM) here on Saturday.

The vice chancellor said that Pakistan’s family planning programme had greatly suffered due to frequent changes in strategies because of lack of political commitment.

He said India and Pakistan had shown concern for their high population growth and had launched family planning programs in the early 1960s but current lower rate of contraceptive use in South Asia was due to missing element of proper family planning.

Dr Karim said that South Asia with over one-fourth of world’s population, was poorest region after sub-Saharan region but due to high population growth rate during second half of 20th century, it had suffered from a high infant child mortality rate, a low level of literacy (particularly among women) and endemic poverty.

While explaining persistently high fertility in developing countries in 1960s, he said most social scientists and demographers from West as well as South Asia believed that fertility was generally embedded in cultural and religious factors, which encouraged families to have too many children.

Dr Karim said demographers had been trying to get attention of policy makers since there was a dire need for Pakistan to slow its population growth. He said Pakistan’s population was growing by around two percent a year.

Published in Daily Times, November 18^th 2018.