Amongst the tide of dismal economic data released ahead of the budget presentation are building the currents of the next crisis that could inundate Pakistan.
While media attention remains fixated – rightly so – on shorter-term problems such as the ever-growing threat of militancy, the cresting polarization of society, a recurring power crisis and an inflation rate that only seems to rise, the greater demographic problem facing the country is too often relegated to the sidelines. While actions taken to address the population explosion in Pakistan may appear less urgent – and will yield results evident only in the long-term – action must be taken now lest the currents building around this crisis crest into a tsunami.
The statistics are sobering, according to a piece in The Express Tribune:
- At 2.1 percent, Pakistan has the dubious honour of having South Asia’s highest population growth rate.
- On average, two people died and eight were born every minute in Pakistan in 2010, meaning the country’s population increased by six people every minute of the year, on average.
- This translates into a growth in the Pakistani population of half a million people in the last year. This would be added to the estimated population of 177.1 million as of July 1st 2010.
The implications of these statistics are both enormous and alarming. While power shortages, inflation and unemployment may be the current fault lines upon which the country’s economy is stumbling, adding this many people to the population every year could stretch even the strongest and most vibrant economy to the max.
As our education sector and national infrastructure are involved in a perennial game of catch-up to meet an ever growing demand, they too will fall behind in the face of an ever-increasing target populace. Evidence of this problem is already starting to take hold. Though Pakistan’s official literacy rate increased from 18 percent to 50 percent, according to numbers from 2009, the number of illiterate people in the country increased from 28 million to 48 million, according to UNESCO numbers.
In addition to a burgeoning population that threatens to overwhelm an already struggling education sector, the country’s massive youth bulge and continued population growth has severe economic impacts as well. The Labour Force Survey of 2009-2010 credits Pakistan with the ninth largest available labour force in the world at 54.92 million people. With an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, this may appear to provide Pakistan with a formidable engine of economic growth, though 29.1 percent of those employed – more than two-thirds of whom are women – are working as “unpaid family helpers.”
Attempts to stem this growing population crisis have so far been far from successful, as the country’s population growth rate declined by only 1.01 percent in the last 30 years. From 1960 to the present, Pakistan’s population has quadrupled, according to a vice-president at Population Action International. Indeed, the United Nations’ recent population projections for Pakistan in 2050 increased by 45 million in two years. Citing the Economic Survey of Pakistan, The Express Tribune says one of the main reasons for this explosive growth is a shockingly low prevalence rate for contraceptives – the lowest “not just in South Asia but among major Muslim countries”. While Pakistan’s contraceptive prevalence rate stands at an appalling 30 percent, we are less than half the Asian average of 67 percent and even more significantly behind the rate of our neighbour, the Islamic Republic of Iran which boasts a contraceptive prevalence rate of 74 percent.
Indeed one reason Iran was able to control its population growth so successfully was because of – not in spite of – the conservative regime that governs it. Through a broad-based national campaign, the country was able to bring religious leaders into the discussion on family planning. This not only brought the issue into the mainstream but helped in the devising of a broad-based national policy that worked within, rather than against the country’s societal and cultural norms, developing an Iranian solution for an Iranian problem.
To begin such a process in Pakistan, we, as Pakistanis need to engender a national discussion on family planning and develop our own solutions to our looming population crisis, before it overwhelms us.
In a meeting on 27 November 1931, Italian ruler Mussolini requested Allama Iqbal to give some exceptional suggestion for him. Iqbal advised, “Don’t allow overcrowding of the cities. Limit the size of the population of a city and after that limit instead of allowing them to settle there, create new settlements and cities for them.”
Elaborating his point, Iqbal said, “As population of a city increases, its moral values and economic power start waning. Worst, immoral activities start challenging the cultural strength.”
And this is, I think, the crux of the problem/solution. Law making is very easy anywhere, but implementation of absolutely any law is hardly possible in overly crowded cities. Public awareness about civic values can not be generated in congested cities. Although economic opportunities are greater in larger cities but this is exactly the phenomenon which deviates the attention of the individual from personal and family contentment to the materialistic goals of amassing more and more capital items. Increased population (at a place) => Increased competition => Increased workload => Increased depression => lost social setup.
So, build and develop more cities with considerable distance among them so as not to expand already congested cities. A bad example in this regard is the new Zulfiqarabad Project just miles away from Karachi.
p.s. Some people say that Iqbal’s advice was actually narration of a Hadith-e Nabawi (PBUH), but I was unable to verify it.
Total fertility rate is a leading indicator for growth rate of the future (population growth typically continues after the replacement TFR of about 2 is reached but follows the same trend with a lag). The following link has a nice graphic of the TFR for all South Asian countries since 1960.
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l &strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y =lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:IND:PAK :LKA:BGD:BTN:NPL:MDV&tstart=-315619200000&tunit=Y &tlen=49&hl=en&dl=en
Pakistan has actually shown a significant shift in the slope of the curve after 1990 – it was almost flat until then and shows a relatively big dip afterwards. Of course, this performance is good in absolute terms, but pales in comparison to Bangladesh, which surprisingly has a better performance than even Sri Lanka on this score. Sri Lanka is typically the leading country in most indicators – social and economic – in South Asia but not for TFR. Bangladesh started out with a higher TFR than Pakistan, but has one of the lowest in South Asia as of now (only tiny and prosperous Maldives does better).
India is better than Pakistan but has a long way to go as well. Both India and Pakistan, being the two largest countries, show significant disparities in social indicators across regions. In India’s case for instance, states like Kerala, Goa, the North-eastern states and to some extent the other southern states and Maharashtra are way higher than other states in these indicators. Kerala approaches first world standards on social indicators, despite its economic performance being only average. I suspect that there are similar disparities in Pakistan as well.
Thus, each of the two countries has significant internal experience that can be transferred to other regions if there is enough political will. This is what we must force our Governments to do. Not copy from other cultures, which may be hard to do. But copy from within our respective countries, transferring best practices from regions with success to regions without.
Khan, I couldn’t agree with you more, as I was thinking of absolutely the same argument. AQL is the difference between humans and animals, which we in Pakistan are trying to remove, this case in point. ADL is the principle on which God created this universe – everything has an order which it follows to the last detail – countless references in Quran, and examples all aournd us for those of us who have the first trait – AQL. As you so aptly cited, we are destroying that ADL or balance that is the hallmark of this universe – be it through overpopulation, or through environmental deterioration. And our so called Mullahs are only concerned about our pre-destined fate. What happened to Iqbal’s “Khudi”, and rising to create a strong nation.
If there was such a thing as a “Misery Index”, Pakistan will rank real high on it, and we can’t see that in front of our eyes.
And folks like Moise have the nerve to lecture me about resource development.
Wikipedia (citing United Nation) says that Population growth rate of Pakistan between 2005-2010 is 1.84%, ranked 62 among 230 countries and territories. The World average for the same period is given as 1.17.
The same page gives a ranking by CIA Fact book for the year 2009 reporting Pakistan’s growth rate at 1.56%, ranked 83 among 232 countries and territories.
Another Page at Wikipedia ranks Pakistan at 9 among 185 countries in terms of labour force (55.9 million in 2009 est). The only thing required is the will and capacity to provide skills to this huge mass and use this human capital locally. Besides we can earn enormous remittances by exporting the skilled labour to the countries falling short of required workforce due to their drastically low population growth rates.
As our commentator Khan has written in one of his comments below, Ayub Khan had started the pop. growth control program in the 60s – which somehow got side tracked in later years. I recently finished reading Ayub’s diaries and on several occasions in his diaries Ayub has noted that if Pk pop was not controlled then ‘man will be eating man’ in the country by the end of the century (2000). At one point in his diaries he had noted the pop of Pk to be around 200 million by the year 2000 and then followed it by his ‘man eating man’ comment. This 200m number included both East and West Pk (Bangladesh).
Today only in Pk it is getting close to 176m people where as Bangladesh which once used to be 56% of combined pak population has done much better than its former West wing and they are now around 151m people (46% of Pk population).