Daily Times

Our public representatives of the country are debating on the National Budget. Unfortunately their speeches focus more on trifle political questions than the complex, data filled national document. While the opposition speeches revolve around the debt increase, price hike, climate change without doable suggestions on how to increase agricultural yield; fill the cavernous gap between exports and imports; get out of the debt trap; ensure food security, and above all, how to balance our galloping population vis-a-vis our shrinking economic resources.

Pakistan is at the tip of a population explosion. The political and social leadership has ignored this challenge and is impacting almost every sphere of our national life. Already a nation of 207.68 million and growing at twice the level of others in the region with resource constraints and potential threats to the national security, the livelihood and survival of our people, this menace has to be addressed on an immediate basis.

Even the least developed states of Sub-Saharan Africa focus on population resources, balanced with long and sustained programmes to lower fertility rates in a bid to secure the basic rights for their existing and future generations. It was their top priority, taking all segments of their societies on board and they succeeded to achieve spectacular results.

With our current population we can feel the resource constraints in education, healthcare and food security. A huge number of our people (over 45%) subsist in extreme poverty earning less than $150 a month; over 22.8 million children between the ages of 5-16 are out of school with the female literacy rate dropping to 47%. No meaningful improvement has been made in the existing education and healthcare infrastructure for the past many decades. Due to the lack of secure jobs, education, healthcare and security of life in rural Pakistan, there has been a steady growth in the unplanned urbanization. Our towns and cities have too meagre resources to cope up with their burgeoning populations.

People in Bangladesh were educated on family planning through constant advocacy, communication and service delivery across the country. This programme was relentlessly followed by every government. This decades-long policy has yielded spectacular results

Bangladesh offers an excellent example for population control. All government departments, service delivery sectors, NGOs, civil society and Ulema Councils were on board and a consensus was developed for a family planning programme. People were educated through constant advocacy, communication and service delivery across the country. This programme was relentlessly followed by every government. This decades-long policy has yielded spectacular results.

Bangladesh maintained fertility of 2.3 children for decades as contrasted with the high fertility of 3.6 children in our country, and saved resources to make investment in people, their education, health and capacity building. In Bangladesh, the child mortality is half the level in Pakistan and its citizens will live five years longer on average, while female literacy has gone up to 75 percent. The country also boasts robust economic development with per capita income of $2000 (compared to our approximately $1400), foreign exchange reserves of $42billion and growth rate of 5.2% during the pandemic last year’.

According to UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ ‘World Population Prospects’ report, our population will leap to 403 million by 2050 but our resources will not grow at the same speed. The agricultural yield has been decreasing since a decade or so owing to the high prices of inputs, a progressive drop in land productivity, scarcity of water and water logging. The burgeoning housing schemes in urban Pakistan have already devoured large chunks of agricultural lands, including orchards around towns and cities which abundantly supplied fresh fruits and vegetables. We have already become a net food importing nation.

For decades, the public Sector Enterprises have been dysfunctional, incurring huge circular debts; the growth in the private sector has been sluggish with our exports and Foreign Exchange Reserves hovering around $20 billion and $22 billion respectively. There is a yawning gap between our exports and imports.

The population planning division has been dispensed at the federal level. The provinces have huge administrative paraphernalia for population planning with hundreds of thousands of male and female health visitors and ghost employees. I cannot vouchsafe for any other province, but Sindh’s family planning department has turned into a big burden on the provincial exchequer. Corruption is endemic with billions of public money going into pockets of the authorities. Thousands of field workers visit their accounts branches by the end of month to draw their salaries without doing anything productive. It is unfathomable how the department has so far escaped the attention of the accountability watchdog.

The population explosion poses a perennial threat to our economy and national security. We should address it as a serious challenge. There is a loose federal task force on population planning. It is high time that we should evolve consensus for a comprehensive policy for population planning. We can revamp this federal task force to implement this policy in coordination with the provincial Governments. The policy should involve all political and religious parties, concerned departments, civil society, NGOs, Ulema Councils for creating public awareness by advocacy and communication employing print and electronic and social media and other digital tools.

The writer was a member of the Foreign Service of Pakistan and he has authored two books