Ministry of Population Welfare has included population-related contents in the revised national educational curriculum from class 9 to 12 to create awareness among the students about implications of overpopulation.
An official source of Ministry of Population Welfare told APP on Monday that after having intensive deliberations with Education Ministry in presence of experts, eight contents were reached upon to include them in the revised syllabus, claimed to be addressing contemporary and future challenges.
"Review of curricula on population issues in collaboration with the Ministry of Education will create awareness concerning implications of over-population on environment, food, health, housing, education with a view to providing quality life to masses through establishing balance between size of population and resources, he observed.
Elaborating, he said these contents had been mentioned under the heads of Population Growth and its Implications, Population and Environment, Population and Standard of living, Health and Nutrition, Gender Awareness and Women Empowerment, Human Rights, Education on HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis and Drug Abuse, and Role and Responsibilities of Family, School, Mosque and Community in population.
Answering a question, he said that these contents in no way were reflecting efforts, as wrongly perceived in past, to restrict family size to a particular number of individuals, rather these subjects were designed to take broad view of the situation emerged in wake of overpopulation, he added.
Asked about subjects which would incorporate texts on these themes, he said that main subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, General Science, Home Economics, Mathematics, Pakistan Studies, Islamyiat, Education, Civics and Language subjects of Urdu and English had been selected to put across the message in this regard.
He said Population Ministry's programmes are yielding concrete results but the credit also goes to media as it had adopted active role in creating awareness about implications of over-population, especially at the grassroots level, to expedite socio-economic development of the country.