Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif chairs a meeting on people’s welfare in Islamabad on Tuesday. Photo: X/PMO
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stressed on Tuesday that maintaining a balance between population growth and available resources was essential for sustainable development, saying that rapid population growth puts increasing pressure on national resources and poses a major challenge to the country’s progress.
Chairing a high-level meeting on population welfare, the Prime Minister stated that population planning must be aligned with national development, economic stability and improvement of human resources, according to a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office Media Wing (PMO).
He directed the authorities to convene the constituent meeting of the National Population Council at the earliest and directed that its organizational structure be finalized without delay to facilitate effective policy-making on population-related issues.
The meeting was attended by Chief of Defense and Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, Minister of State for Finance and Railways Bilal Azhar Kayani and senior government officials.
The Prime Minister announced that he would personally chair the National Population Council, which will include the Chief Ministers of all four provinces, the Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan and other key stakeholders.
During the meeting, the participants were briefed on the country’s increasing population and measures aimed at population control and welfare.
The briefing’s members highlighted plans to link social protection programs with family planning initiatives, while stressing that women’s education and economic empowerment would form a central pillar of the national population strategy.
The meeting participants were also informed that a nationwide public awareness campaign would be launched to promote balanced population growth and family planning.
Participants were further informed that successful population management programs were currently being implemented in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Iran.
According to the PMO, the National Population Council in collaboration with provincial governments will help implement an effective nationwide population welfare campaign.
Also read: Ahsan calls population growth unsustainable
It was also stated that the council’s secretariat would be established in the Ministry of Planning.
Pakistan’s population, which stood at 31 million at the time of independence in 1947, rose to 241 million according to the 2023 census. However, last year new figures released by the US Census Bureau estimated the population had crossed 257 million, further cementing Pakistan’s status among the world’s most populous nations despite a decline in fertility rates.
According to United Nations World Fertility Report 2024Pakistan’s fertility rate has fallen from six live births per woman in 1994 to 3.6 in 2024. Despite the decline, the country is expected to become the world’s third most populous nation by 2050, surpassing the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Russia, with a population expected to exceed 380 million.
The projections are supported by the official Population projections 2023–50 report, prepared in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which estimates that Pakistan’s population will grow by 59 percent to more than 383 million by 2050.
On Monday, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal also warned that unchecked population growth was Pakistan’s most critical structural challenge and called for urgent reforms at the national level to address the problem.
“No country in history has achieved sustained progress with such high population growth,” he said, adding that successful nations had reduced their growth rates to about one to 1.5 percent. or lower. He said rapid population growth was diluting economic gains.
“If the economy grows by three percent while the population increases by 2.5 percent, the real progress is only half a percent,” he said, describing it as a major obstacle to national prosperity.
