Category Archives: Population

Won’t we be counted?

Economy, Population, Women

ACCORDING to Pakistan’s Population Census Organisation’s website, enumeration of the population should have been completed on Sept 27, 2011. This has not been done.

Even the house-listing operation that precedes the head count has run into road blocks. One can therefore only make wild guesses about the size of our population. According to the government, the population of Pakistan today stands at 177.1 million. The growth rate, as claimed by the Pakistan Economic Survey 2010-11, stands at 2.05 per cent per annum.

This is cause for serious concern as last year’s Survey had quoted the population growth rate to be 1.51 per cent. Continue reading Won’t we be counted? →

PDH survey and status of women

Health, Population, Women

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

WE as a nation shy away from the specifics. That is why numerical data is not our forte. We generalise the information available and reach sweeping conclusions.

This also explains why holding a census or organising surveys is never the first priority of governments even though policymaking tends to be lopsided without accurate statistics.
Continue reading PDH survey and status of women →

Beneficiaries of family planning

Population

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

POPULATION control — or population welfare, if you want to be genteel — is the buzzword today. The focus has been on the economic impact of a rapidly growing population and its implications for employment.

Some scholars have been concerned with the religious dimension since the general impression is that Islamic leaders are opposed to contraception on religious grounds, and so people are reluctant to limit their family size.
Continue reading Beneficiaries of family planning →

Population day thoughts

Population

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

JULY 11 was world population day — a day of introspection on where the human race is heading. In Pakistan, we have plenty of soul-searching to do given our rapidly increasing population and its far-reaching impact on every sector of national life. In 50 years, the population has galloped from 33 million to 152 million to make Pakistan the seventh most populous country in the world.

It is now recognized that one of the causes — not the only one — of the country’s economic backwardness, poor education level and social underdevelopment is the population factor. The government now claims that the population growth rate came down to 1.9 per cent in 2004-2005 — at one time it was three per cent. According to the official sources in Pakistan the total fertility rate (TFR), that is the average number of children a woman has in her reproductive years, has come down from 4.8 in 2000-01 to 4.07 in 2004-05.
Continue reading Population day thoughts →