Pakistan is facing numerous problems, including food, drinking water, education, health, unemployment and shelter. The reasons are well-known, but nobody even once tried to understand that behind all these problems, there is one major reason and that is the population explosion.
The world's financial experts have placed Pakistan on a list of 36 countries that face a serious food crisis. And that is again due to reason of population. It is time that we develop the awareness on population. South Korea is one such example whose programme to lower the birthrate had an unexpected result: Fertility fell so far below the replacement levels that population is ageing and decline in population size is a real prospect. South Korea initiated a population policy to lower the birthrate during the 1960s and 1970s to have its birthrate fall to world record low levels.
In Pakistan, the population growth rate is among the world's highest, officially estimated at 3.1 percent per year, but privately thought to be closer to 3.3 percent per year by many planners involved in population programmes. Pakistan's population was expected to reach 150 million by 2000 and to account for 4 percent of the world's population growth between 1994 and 2004, Pakistan's population is expected to double between 1994 and 2022.
If you were to take a standard sheet of writing paper .1mm thick and cut it into two sheets, placing one atop the other, it would then be .2mm thick. Then, cutting the stack of two and making a stack of 4 sheets, it would then be .4mm thick. Believe it or not, if you continue to do this just one hundred times, doubling the size of the stack each time, the thickness of the stack would be 1.334x(10)12 light-years. This is an example of exponential or geometric growth, where the rate of growth is always proportional to its present size.
Population control is one of the critical issues of our time. In underdeveloped countries like Pakistan, birth control is considered a sin against God by some narrow-minded fanatics. The fact is that population explosion is not merely an economic problem; it is also a big social problem. Parents, having too many children, cannot pay attention to the mental, physical, and spiritual growth and betterment of each of their children. As a result, their children feel neglected.
More than half of Pakistan's population is below the age of fifteen; nearly a third is below the age of nine. For cultural reasons, enumerating the precise number of females has been difficult - and estimates of the percentage of females in the population range from 47.5 percent in the 1981 census to 48.3 percent in the 1987-88 Labour Force Survey. Pakistan is one of the few countries in the world with an inverse sex ratio: official sources claim there are 111 men for every 100 women. The discrepancy is particularly obvious among people over fifty: men in this category account for 7.1 percent of the country's total population and women for less than 5 percent. This figure reflects the secondary status of females in Pakistani society, especially their lack of access to quality medical care. But the females are now 51% in 2010.
Pakistan is experiencing unwanted growth. While projections indicate that the population growth rate of Pakistan may actually be decreasing, those same projections also predict that by the year 2050, Pakistan will have assumed its place as the third most populated nation in the world. Even now if we don't take this problem seriously, we keep on facing unemployment, food, water, education, health and many other problems.
But the main cause of population explosion in our country is illiteracy. The ugly truth is that people like doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and other much-educated people are not giving importance to this issue. And even they normally have four kids.
People must stick to two kids whether it's boy or girl. This rate of population growth kept the people poor and the country dependent on foreign aid. Population control and family planning, therefore, were a top priority of the government and social workers. Even China and Bangladesh controlled their birth rates which are very good example for countries like Pakistan. (http://arzukazmi.blogspot.com)
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