Altaf Hamid Rao.
MIRPUR (AJK), (Parliament Times) : Eminent icons from diverse segments of civil society besides seasoned experts for family planning here on Thursday emphasized the need of addressing and implementing the mechanism to ensure the national narrative of ‘balance’ in the population growth with prime focus to successfully combat the challenges of the rapidly increased population, the world is facing with.
Speakers including AJK minister for Power Development and Energies Ch. Arshad Hus-sain, Commissioner Mirpur Division Ch. Shoukat, Director General Population Welfare Department of AJK Zeashan Arif, District Population Welfare Officer Kamran Choudhry, Director General Auqaf AJK Hafiz Nazir Ahmed Qadri, Senior Kashmiri journalist Altaf Hamid Rao, District Mufti Abdul Ghafaar Selfi, Moulana Iftikhar Ahmed Hashmir, Prof. Dr. Saima Kousar, Afeera Javed from Mirpur University and others expressed these views at Awarness Seminar for Religious Scholars, Parliamentarians, Media and Civil Soceity on national narrative on population ‘TAWAZUN’, hosted here on Thursday under the auspices of AJK Population Welfare Department with the collaboration of United Nations agency for population welfare in the world – UNFPA.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), formerly the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, is a UN organization. The UNFPA says it “is the lead UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled”.
Lauding the AJK Population Welfare Department on holding the seminar to understand the challenge of rapid population growth and its fallouts, including but not limited to, on sustainable development, national economy and GDP in true spirit, speakers expressed the hope that the grand event would certainly add a new lively spirit for on-going efforts for population management in Pakistan as well as in AJK.
Speakers continued that rapid growth of population in Pakistan has emerged as serious challenge both for the Policy makers as well as the Policy implementers.
“At present, as per Population and Housing Census 2017 — Pakistan was the sixth most populous country in the world with a population of 207.8 Million growing at an tercentennial growth rate of 2.4% per annum between 1998 – 2017.—While now Country has emerged as fifth most populous country.At this rate, Pakistan’s population will double in the next 30 years, compared with an average doubling time of 60 years for other South Asian countries”, they underlined.
Speakers observed as saying that the population of the country was projected to increase to 285 million by 2030.
“ Such a high level of population growth is unsustainable and has already eaten into the modest gains made in terms of socio-economic development”, they added.
“We must be cognizant that the rapidly growing population has direct negative implications for adverse climate change, environmental degradation, deforestation and above all, the decline in water availability per capita — putting Pakistan in water stress situation. Besides, It will also aggravate food security and threaten the country’s sustainable development prospects”, they underlined.
“The unmet need for Family Planning Services remains high at 17% indicating that mil-lions of married couples are unable to receive adequate access to information and ser-vices to have the number of children and the spacing they desire”, speakers said adding “ this is a denial of fundamental human right ”.
“This gap between their intent and actual usage of family planning services is associated with long physical distances, costs and social barriers, and in particular, with mispercep-tions about modern contraceptives which are more pronounced in the rural areas”, they observed and added that all these access factors affect the poor and uneducated more seriously.
Speakers underlined that the poor state of affairs regarding alarming high population growth rate in the country — was seriously taken notice of by the Supreme Court of Pa-kistan as Human Rights Case in 2018. —— the apex court inter-alia had termed —
‘the steadily increasing population rate in Pakistan is a ticking bomb which will certainly not wait till it is convenient for us to take note of it.’
Sharing his views on the topic, senior Kashmiri journalist Altaf Hamid Rao recalled that as a part of global efforts, during London Summit on Family Planning, 2012 (FP2020), Pakistan along with more than 20 governments made commitments to address the policy, financing, delivery and socio-cultural barriers to women, —- accessing for reproductive health in purposeful manners.
Referring to the due role of media to raise awareness among the masses about main-training balance in the population growth to avert the future threats of the increased population on socio-economic sector of the life, Rao emphasized that media had an important role to play for creating awareness amongst the couples for the norms of right based small family size to create a balance between resources and family size.
“I am quite hopeful that todays’ congregation will recommend decisive and cogent measures and will leave policy guidelines to be followed by all stakeholders to cope with this serious challenge and to achieve the objectives in real spirit”, he concluded.