The threat to Pakistan is not from across the border but from internal issues, including the inability to control the ticking time bomb of population, said former senator Farhat ullah Babar at a national conference on the status of reproductive health and rights in Pakistan, organised by the NCHR and Awaaz at a local hotel on Monday.
“With the official population count of 207 million people growing at the rate of 2.4%, Pakistan will have 400 million people by 2050, and it is like sitting on a time bomb or facing an express train coming down the track.”
He said that reproductive health was considered a taboo subject, but was brought into the open by slain prime minister Benazir Bhutto as an issue of women’s rights. By personally participating and endorsing the recommendations of international conference on population in Cairo in 1994, she opened the doors for Pakistani women to demand the right to make decisions about their health and family, he said. He called for a robust national political dialogue taking the populations discourse to the provinces, the local level and re-orienting the BISP towards population issues. “It is more important to include the subject of population welfare in the curriculum than to teach the students how we defeated India in 1965 and how India conspired to break Pakistan in 1971.”
Babar said it was a basic right of couples to decide freely the number of children they would want to have and the gap between them, and called for strengthening the lady health workers (LHW) initiative launched by Benazir Bhutto to provide door-to-door service.
“A new population narrative that places human beings, particularly women, at the centre of discourse needs to be developed. Achievement of SDG targets should be incentivised in fiscal transfers from federation to the provinces and from provinces to the local governments,” he said.
He said that political parties should include the population and development narrative in their manifestos.