Azfar calls for urgent steps to check rising population growth

Kamal Azfar, former Governor of Sindh, has drawn the attention of the public and media towards the enormously growing population of Pakistan and the dangers that this could entail in the coming years. Kamal Azfar has said in a statement that while Pakistan may be proud to be the 5th largest nation in the world, this position does not absolve it from the responsibility of its exploding population.
Azfar said that as the situation stood now, while Pakistan's population was growing at the rate of 2 per cent per year and there were more mouths to feed every day, the economy was in a fix and it was becoming difficult to meet the various economic indicators in a satisfactory manner. If Pakistan went for loans from international financial institutions such as the IMF, this would also spell trouble for the people and their everyday lives would become more difficult.
Kamal Azfar was very appreciative of the role the Supreme Court of Pakistan was playing in this regard. It was very encouraging, he said, that recently it had expressed serious concern over the high population growth in the country and had asked the government to form a uniform policy to defuse the population bomb.
Azfar said there was a serious lack of focus on population growth and the sheer size of increasing numbers will prove to be a continuous disaster. He said the country needed to devise ways to control further growth of the population through serious parliamentary legislation and imposition of restrictions on each family to not have more two to 3 children. He said other effective population control measures could also be enforced through better education and awareness.
He said some of the major steps required to curb the adverse consequences of the population explosion would have to be two-pronged: one, control the growth and two, minimize the damage of existing high numbers.
There was a dire need, Kamal Azfar said, of understanding the adverse impact of the population growth rate at all levels and using all means available to curb this growth. -PR