Population growth

Will the government walk the talk?

The government has set an ambitious target of halving the population growth rate, currently 2.55 percent, to 1.25 percent, by 2035. This was decided in a meeting chaired by the Prime Minister, who has backed publicly the idea that the National Finance Commission Award should not award provinces a share based on population, which had been the sole criterion until the 2012 Award. The NFC that year admitted that other criteria should be included, shares were regulated accordingly. The federal government has come up with the idea of removing population as a criterion for the distribution of the NFC within the provinces, with population control and health and education outcomes.

The concern which the PM expressed at the meeting, which had been recently formulated by Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal, has been that too many people would strain resources. A school would become overcrowded, a new hospital would need staff, and no matter how much you threw at a constantly growing population, it would always be outstripped by new population growth. This does not count the problem of climate change, where decreased water means straining already limited food resources. The target set by the PM might seems small, a reduction of 1.3 percent in five years, but it should be bored that population growth  has barely gone down half a percentage point in half a century . That means the population control mechanism is not working. The government should keep in mind that population control is the result of a couple’s own decision, and such efforts as China’s notorious one-child policy, or the forced vasectomies in 1970s India have either not worked or had unintended and unexpected demographic consequences.

If the government feels able to deliver an adequate population control policy, perhaps it will pay more attention to some of the other areas of development. There appears a direct correlation between population growth and state provision of healthcare and education. At the moment, resources put into population control will mean resources diverted from such things as roads and bridges. The plea for provinces to control population welfare by the Sindh government is a reminder of how strongly it tried to use numbers, claiming at the 2017 census that its population had been undercounted, While there obviously must be correlation between population and government spending, with the present set of NFC criteria, it is difficult to see what incentive the provinces have for reducing population growth.