Talk held on 'Is the Population Bomb Ticking?'

Dr Mehtab Karim, Vice Chancellor, Malir University of Science & Technology (MUST) on Saturday gave a talk on "Is the Population Bomb Ticking?" on Saturday in Karachi. The event was organized by Society for Global Moderation (SGM) at CMC.
Dr Karim, who received his Doctorate in Demography from Cornell University, said that South Asia, with over one-fourth of the world's population, was the poorest region after the Sub-Saharan region but due to high population growth rate during the second half of the 20th century, it had suffered from a high infant child mortality rate, a low level of literacy (particularly among women) and endemic poverty.
While explaining persistently high fertility in developing countries in the 1960s, Dr Karim said most social scientists and demographers from the West as well as South Asia believed that fertility was generally embedded in cultural and religious factors, which encouraged families to have too many children.
He said India and Pakistan had shown concern for their high population growth and had launched family planning programs in the early 1960s but the current lower rate of contraceptive use in South Asia, he said, was due to the missing element of proper family planning.
He said Pakistan's family planning programme had greatly suffered due to changed strategies because of lack of political commitment. The population planning process in Pakistan was based on a faulty framework and the population explosion may become a threat to the very existence of the nation as there will be 342 million people in Pakistan by 2050.
Dr Karim said demographers had been trying to get the attention of policy makers since there was a dire need for Pakistan to slow its population growth. He said Pakistan's population was growing by around two per cent a year. He also mentioned the youth bulge in Pakistan's population and said that some 64 per cent of the 200 million-plus people were under than 30. He said economic gains were still not just around the corner yet. The employed youth had to be given jobs but Pakistan also needs to arrest the ticking population bomb. If it was not diffused, economic prosperity will always be an elusive dream for Pakistan.
Earlier, Syed Jawaid Iqbal, Chairman, Society for Global Moderation (SGM) introduced the Guest Speaker. In his remarks, Jawaid Iqbal urged the government and parliamentarians to introduce legislation requiring every family to have not more than two or 3 children. After the Talk, Jawaid Iqbal also conducted a Question-Answer session. Besides many other events, SGM has organized similar talks by Najmuddin Shaikh, former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan and Senator Raza Rabbani, former Chairman, Senate of Pakistan.