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Old Friday, March 30, 2012
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Default Population Explosion (Important Articles)

We need a population emergency

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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Old Saturday, April 07, 2012
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Is population our elephant in the room?
By Syed Mohammad Ali
Published: April 7, 2012

According to the preliminary findings of Pakistan’s latest census, the country’s population has increased by 46.9 per cent between the period of 1998 and 2011, from about 130 million in 1998 to over 192 million, with Balochistan having recorded the highest growth amongst all our provinces.

These findings, undoubtedly, have serious implications meriting attention by our policymakers as well as the citizenry at large. But what has prompted me to write this article is perhaps, an email sent out to several Pakistani journalists and analysts, by a rather enthusiastic Indian based in London, complaining about how Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders are ignoring this major problem. Discounting the fact that his own country is now the second most populous in the world, he claimed that India has done a much better job of managing its population, given that it has just quadrupled from over 300 million in 1947 to about 1.2 billion, while Pakistan’s population has gone up from 30 million to 192 million over the same period which implies over a 6 times increase. Furthermore, he advocated that Pakistan needs to take drastic action, such as adopting a coercive one child policy to significantly curb our population or else it will become even more ungovernable.

A more assertive rebuttal to such an assertion requires no more than pointing towards the hapless state of development indicators in India itself, or to describe this unsolicited assertion as a malicious attempt to fuel western fears concerning Pakistani fragility. Instead of indulging in such unconstructive arguments, however, let us try to reconsider existing possibilities of contending with our population growth rate more effectively.

Although optimists at home and abroad point to the potential demographic dividend of our burgeoning young population, they are also cautioning that immediate measures are needed to constructively harness this potential or it could turn into exacerbating social unrest instead of increased productivity. But doing so requires reshuffling our current spending priorities with an increased emphasis on human development goals. Yet, many donors and neo-liberal planners continue placing trust in market-led growth policies instead and avoid the contention of trying to redirect existing resource allocations patterns.

Conversely, it has also been argued that if our black/informal economy is taken into account, the Pakistani middle class accounts for about 40 per cent of our population, which is similar to the situation in India. The underlying argument here was that if our middle class is large enough, the existing paranoia concerning Pakistan’s fragility or growing radicalisation would prove unfounded, since a larger middle class will invariably keep Pakistan moving on a relatively liberal path in terms of its economic and political development.

While income assessments remain contested, it is hard to deny that poverty is not a severe problem for our country. Unsustainable population growth has already outstripped the capacity of the state to provide even basic amenities to a vast majority of the masses. Due to cultural and belief-based preferences, many poor people continue to have large families to help ensure household survival by putting their children to work. However, due to insufficient education their productive capacity is not adequately developed. Provision of better social services, including emphasis on female education, can help overcome such trends.

It is not impossible to alter societal preferences for family sizes either. For instance, there have been earlier attempts to use religious principles to highlight the need for a manageable family by local family planning organisations. However, limited outreach coupled with lack of continued re-emphasis, implies that many uneducated mullahs still frown upon family planning attempts. Despite the fact that religion itself places emphasis on breast feeding children for about two years, which would inherently necessitate birth spacing and help lessen mother and child mortality significantly.

The Express Tribune
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Old Tuesday, April 02, 2013
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Population pressures
By Khawaja IzharUl Hassan

The writer is a member of the MQM Central Information Committee, a former provincial minister and former adviser to the Sindh chief minister
Ever wonder why we vehemently talk of Pakistan’s social decay and blame it on factors ranging from terrorism to political crisis to economic woes, but never take pains to penetrate deeper into other factors, which are as responsible for its deterioration as the former?

Have we ever dared to compare the deaths caused by terrorist attacks with the deaths of mothers and children during delivery due to lack of medical facilities, malnourishment and unplanned pregnancies? Terrorist attacks have killed 40,000 in the country since 2011 and according to the Population Council, a reputable international NGO, around 20,000 mothers die every year from complications during childbirth. Further, our child mortality rate is the fourth largest in the world.

Pakistan has a population of 180 million; it contains 2.58 per cent of the world’s population and is the sixth most populous country in the world. Its total fertility rate (TFR) is three, which is the highest when compared with the world birth rate of 1.1 per cent. Economically, Pakistan has no more than three per cent economic growth — almost equal to the birth rate — clearly showing unstable economic growth.

One can disagree with China’s one-child policy but cannot deny its economic growth of 9.2 per cent, which clearly shows the economic strength of the most populous country in the world. China consists of 1.35 billion people — 19 per cent of the entire world population of seven billion.

Similarly, Bangladesh contained more than 55 per cent of the country’s population when it was East Pakistan, before 1971, and now it is still at 150 million; i.e., 2.16 per cent of the world population. It is the eighth most populous country and has a TFR of 2.2. Its economic growth rate is 6.1 per cent. According to UN projections, if fertility rates remain constant, Pakistan’s population will jump to nearly 380 million by 2050 and the country will face a devastating scarcity of resources.

As a matter of fact, this unbridled population will have an adverse impact on the distribution of natural resources, including food, water and shelter. It is proven that population is inversely proportional to per capita income and that the economy receives a direct impact from an increase in population. The Malthusian Theory of Population is still workable to understand the relation of population growth in geometric means and food growth in arithmetic means while technology remains constant.

Unfortunately, the Government of Pakistan and political parties still do not have a clear vision to address this issue with respect to economics and security of society. In the past, governments simply began imposing birth control panic with different slogans like “do bachay khush haal gharana” or “bachay do hi achay“, which created further fear and confusion among masses.

During the recent democratic government’s rule, Balochistan had a TFR of 4.1 and there seemed to be no activity by the Population Welfare Department in the province. Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have had a TFR of 4.3 for the last 10 years and no significant progress has been made. Punjab also has a TFR of 3.9 and again, the Population Welfare Department lagged behind and only remained engaged for five long years with the health department on power transfers.

Ironically, major political parties chant slogans for the empowerment of women but when it comes to women’s health, they hesitate to include the population issue in their manifestos. The MQM is the only political party whose manifesto reflects the family welfare concept as per the need of the hour.

There is a great need for introducing legislation in parliament to provide an enabling environment for mothers and children to seek health care and make it incumbent upon the state to provide essential services. Investment in education and health for our women can considerably increase the economic growth of the country. Health education should be part of school curricula at the middle and higher levels. Furthermore, there is a need to incorporate lady health workers into the local government system to provide basic awareness, facilities and services to males and females at the grass-root level.

It is food for thought for all of us to stabilise the economic growth of our country, manage its resources, prevent our mothers and newborns from death, and have safe births to protect and secure society at large.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 2nd, 2013.
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Old Friday, April 05, 2013
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Exigent need for viable policies

Dr. Prof. Ghulam Shabir

Pakistan is a blessed country as a large part of its population consists of young people. It has a big population that can be categorised as falling within the UN's definition of youth.

Blessed in the sense that this huge part of the population has the potential of creating a faster growth through seeking modern-day knowledge and carrying out hard work by virtue of the nascent energies they are endowed with by nature.

However, this blessing may become a curse if the governments, policymakers and civil society at large fail to play their role with regard to the youth of the country.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) statistics, an estimated 103 million Pakistanis, or 63% of the population, fall under the age of 25 years. The total population of Pakistan is 164.6 million, and 36 million of them are in the age group of 15-24 years (2007).

According to conservative estimates, the number of people in the young age group (15-49 years) and the total labour force are projected to nearly double by 2050 in Pakistan.

Andrew Mason, an economics professor at the University of Hawaii and a senior fellow at the East-West Centre, says in a research paper that an increase in the labour force is favourably linked to the economy. He has co-authored an Asian Development Bank 2011 study, Population, Wealth, and Economic Growth in the Asia and Pacific Region. The study highlights the support ratio in Pakistan (effective number of workers per effective consumer) will grow at about 0.6% per year.

Recently, a research paper, authored by political economist Dr. S. Akbar Zaidi for Oxford Analytica, also analysed the demographic transition in Pakistan. The study noted that the transition had led to two different views: "one celebrates the emergence of a young and dynamic population as a harbinger of prosperity; the other expects that an inability to house, feed and provide jobs to the youth will pave the way for instability, possibly even anarchy."

Dr. Zaidi believes that a young population is considered a harbinger of prosperity because it can be put to better use with its education and skills and contribute to the economy and society. However, he doesn't subscribe to the theory that unemployment will lead to social upheaval in Pakistan, or that it leads to 'Talibanisation'.

The study says that while unemployment is officially an estimated 5.6%, the figure is unreliable and the presence of a large informal economy - including in the agricultural and services sectors - conceals actual unemployment figures.
Social theorists also argue that an excess of young men in a population can stir social unrest and terrorism, if not provided with extensive supervision and guidelines. Several studies show that youth populations in developing countries are associated with higher unemployment and, therefore, a greater risk of violence and political instability.

Pakistan has also suffered from this problem on a large scale during the past decades. The year 1979 and the decade following it gave Pakistan a new identity- incubator of Mujahideen, with its periphery loaded with people who could be used to combat war on the strength of Islam against the proposed and, at times, designed enemies.

Through those years, the young lot of the country, in the absence of any direction, flew into the ranks of those who could afford them not only direction, but board and lodging as well, minimising the burden of poverty laid on the parents of these youth by the misplaced financial priorities of the government of Pakistan.

In fact, in those times the aim of life designed for the young recruits was simple: Obeying the decree of Allah, which actually meant standing against any force that could be a threat to Islam. The definition of threat was defined by the providers. In the same tone, in the urban setting, in the absence of government intervention, the universities like Punjab, Karachi and Peshawar became heavily radicalised. On the one hand, the University of the Punjab got into the tangles of Islamisation, and on the other, Karachi and Peshawar varsities brewed ethnicity.

In the following years, the large number of adolescents entering the workforce created unemployment and alienation, as no new opportunities were created. That did not bode well for a country already troubled by violence and unrest.
It is a pity that successive governments in Pakistan failed to make a comprehensive national youth policy. The youth were not provided with appropriate opportunities to put their natural talent to creative, productive and useful channels. The only National Youth Policy of Pakistan was presented in 2008. However, that policy too offered wrong solutions to problems.

The policy, regrettably, failed to offer any solution to genuine and real problems of the youth of Pakistan, especially those 80% young people living in rural areas of the country. The policy placed a good level of emphasis on skill development through need assessment, but there was no reference to research and development. If one is to prepare the youth for the 21st century, how could it be possible without provision of research and development facilities? Science, research, and technology are the prerequisites for the youth to join the global scientific revolution.

According to a research article by Durdana Najam, the policy offered a hazy employment strategy. Training and preparing youth for the job market was missing. Provision of skills does not ensure job opportunities (as suggested in the report) it can only raise the chances of getting a job. In the absence of a job market, no skill set can be helpful in making ends meet.

Experts believe the youth policy should intersect at some point with the education policy. As has been envisaged in the National Education Policy of Pakistan (2009), the education budget awaits revision from 2 to 7% of the GDP. Policymakers, both inside and outside Pakistan, should give careful consideration to whether and how education investments can promote peace and stability, taking into account what we now know about the state of education sector and the roots of militancy.

It is a good sign, however, that almost all political parties have started focusing on the youth lately, thanks to the pro-active approach of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf towards the younger generation of the country. The PTI has placed emphasis on the concerns of the disillusioned youth, and pledged to build a better economic environment with more job opportunities for the youth of Pakistan.

The other parties following in the PTI footsteps are the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan People's Party. With the changing scenarios, it is hoped that whosoever will form the government after the May 11 elections, the youth will get the due share of attention from it. The youth of Pakistan does not need only free computers or empty slogans, but solid policies that could provide them with better education and job opportunities.

http://www.weeklycuttingedge.com/front%20story01.htm
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