Mohammad Malick
March 30, 2012

As a people, we are used to living under one form of emergency or another. Heck, now we have even been reduced to spending the greater part of our cheap lives in the shadows of the even cheaper Chinese ‘emergency’ lights.

In the eighties we had the declared yet forgotten emergency of late Gen Ziaul Haq. It had become so much a part of the national psyche that most people became aware of its existence only after late Mohammad Khan Junejo announced lifting it as one of his earlier actions as prime minister. Generals Yahya and Ayub Khan had their own little tweaked variations, and of course Gen Musharraf’s emergency-plus is too recent a phenomenon for anyone to forget. But while somewhat varying in complexion, all khaki emergencies shared one dominant common trait: negativity. They were conceived by a negative mindset, conniving to ensure a powerful existence for a select power elite.

The time has now come for us to impose a positive civilian emergency in the country to give meaning to the lives of the disfranchised powerless common people. It’s the need of the day to declare a population emergency in the country and to deal with the issue on war footing.

According to the latest statistics, Pakistan’s population has increased by a shocking 47 percent since 1998. The internal configuration is equally telling of the inglorious spread of resources and ignorance. Balochistan has witnessed a 139.3 percent increase in population, Sindh 81.5 percent, Fata 62.1 percent, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 51.6 percent, Punjab 24.1 percent, federal capital Islamabad 43 percent and Gilgit Baltistan 63.1 percent.

While our population boomed, the economy tanked. ‘Real’ economic growth is almost static at 2-2.5 percent, with the over optimistic government itself expecting no more than a 4-5 percent expansion. The government is borrowing billions of rupees every single day only to finance its non-development expenditure. The people and the country are going bankrupt while banks lending to the government are posting profits in the unheard range of 20-30 percent.

During the last four years alone, an additional 35 million wretched citizens were pushed under the official poverty line, and almost 40 percent of the total population is now struggling for existence under the crushing weight of this dreaded red line. Translated into numbers, it comes to a spine-chilling over 7.2 crore desperate souls, who could gladly kill to just get a chance to live.

We need to maintain a double-digit economic development rate into the next decade to merely maintain our currently miserable living standards, let alone cater to the needs of our exploding ranks. But we have yet to touch even a decent single digit growth mark.

At 180 million, we are already the sixth most populous country in the world. And thanks to our stellar ‘breeding performance’, are destined to become the fourth largest population by 2050 when our projected population touches a soul numbing 210 million.

At 180 million, we already suffer a crumbling infrastructure, trains that don’t run, power that never comes, water that is going scarcer by the year (50 percent don’t even have access to clean drinking water), pathetic quality education, food-insecurity, lawlessness as the law of the land, the rich becoming richer and the poor more miserable.

People are in the process of losing everything, including hope. This is life at 180 million. Just imagine life when the population swells to 210 million. The consequences of such a large human mass eking out an existence bereft of basic necessities and robbed of all hope are too scary to even imagine, and too staggering to handle unless preparations commence in earnest.

The population configuration further adds to our woes. Over 65 percent of our population is under 25 with barely 16 percent being literate in the real sense of the word. The devastating ramifications of this disfranchised human bomb could not be over emphasised. And yet what is being done here. Virtually nothing.

Laughable funds, if any, have been allocated to create awareness among the masses about population control even thought it’s an issue warranting a national emergency status. The unmet need for family planning persists above 30 percent.

In an overwhelmingly young nation, the young are being taught nothing about the physical, social and economical benefits of a leaner and cleaner society.

Is this deliberate nonchalance of the extremely rich ruling elite in place primarily because for it large families are an affordable pleasure and not a socio-economic retarding factor, as is the case for the other less fortunate hundreds of million of ordinary ignorant Pakistanis? Or does a greater mass of underprivileged voters provide a more pliable and cheaper electoral food basket?

There is a direct link between people and prosperity. Unless we reign in this population demon, the best of economic plans, made by the best of minds, and executed by the best-intentioned will simply fail. The present population-resources equation is simply untenable. The gap between available resources and ever mounting needs is frighteningly wide.

Our failure to manage the population explosion is already having a direct and devastating impact. Panderers of well-funded extremist ideologies and terrorist outfits are finding happy hunting grounds among our ever-expanding mass of poverty stricken population. Our urban ghettos, with their visible pitiful economic deprivations, and the rural areas, with their somewhat masked poverty fault lines, have transformed into exceptionally fertile recruiting grounds for such elements. Can we afford treating this situation as less than priority numero uno?

Too many compulsions and unmet needs are pulling the country in different directions. Pakistan is threatened by an internal implosion and may not be able to exist in its present physical form unless we make a serious commitment towards population control as a first step in our nation building process. What needs to be done is to increase the standard of living and not the number of the people.

Pakistan’s future does not suffer any fatal threats from the activities of other countries but only from the complacency of our own ruling political elite. Elected for five-year fixed terms, our parliamentarians have further limited their already limited visions to high profile, even if low content, deliverables promising electoral gains. Personal interests hold sway over national priorities.

An initiative is considered feasible only if it offers the promise of yielding results that can be capitalised upon, come next elections. The long-term interests of the country and the people have been abandoned in favour of short-term personal political and power gains. The somewhat laborious, slow moving, perhaps socially awkward at times, and definitely devoid of the usual political rhetoric and grandstanding, population-control initiative does not figure high, if at all, on the agenda of our political leadership. It has simply become one of those projects that are left for ‘others’ to undertake.

Sadly, if matters continue in their current trend then there may not be anything left for ‘others’ to take care of in the coming years. Countries are born, dismembered, and even perish primarily due to the complacency of their people and their leaders. We should know, for we have already suffered one dismemberment and are threatened by another. Our perpetuity lies in our emerging as a nation but unless groomed, a mass of people remains exactly that: an unruly mass, with little past and no future.

We have a vibrant young parliamentarians group in the national assembly that likes to prance about as the harbinger of change. Its members claim to have the courage to cause change rather than be consumed by status quo. Will they get off the trodden path of political convenience, take the first step and convince their peers to declare population control a national emergency? Please think beyond polls; think of the people.


Email: mohammad.malick1@gmail.com
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