Racing the Clock (Part 1)

Pakistan is not short of people. It is short of time. Total fertility has fallen from 4.1 births per woman to 3.6, and contraceptive use has crept up from 27.7 to 34.6 per cent over the same period. Encouraging numbers, until the arithmetic catches up: at this pace, Pakistan will not reach replacement-level fertility until around 2050, roughly 24 years behind Bangladesh, which began its own transition from a harder starting point and got there first. The national average flatters the problem. Strip it away and the real fight comes into view: urban fertility of 3.0 against rural fertility of 4.1; urban contraceptive use of 44 per cent against 34 per cent in the countryside. Provincial gaps are sharper still. Punjab’s fertility rate, near 3.4, sits well below those of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, both close to 4.0, where contraceptive prevalence trails Punjab by more than 20 percentage points. Pakistan’s targets will be won or lost in these gaps, not in a national average that hides them. RDA takes action against illegal constructions in The Avenue-1, Mumtaz City The number that should worry the finance ministry as much as the health ministry is the dependency ratio, currently near 68 per cent. It ties population growth directly to the national budget: every rupee spent on schools, clinics and housing is stretched thinner than it needs to be. It also marks a closing door. Pakistan’s demographic dividend—the stretch when working-age citizens outnumber dependants—is still open. It will not stay that way. By 2047, Pakistan’s centenary, the gap between its best and worst policy paths is roughly 85 million people. That is not a forecast. It is a choice. NHMP sub inspector killed as dumper hits him on GT Road For 15 years, Pakistan has had no shortage of population policies and no institution capable of enforcing one. The 18th Constitutional Amendment devolved population welfare to the provinces in 2010, splitting responsibility for the very sectors that influence fertility—health, education and social protection—across capitals and regions moving at different paces. The National Finance Commission Award still distributes federal funds by population share, quietly rewarding the provinces that grow fastest even as the state tries to slow them down. Coordinating that contradiction needed more than a new policy. It needed an apex forum with the standing to work with the chief ministers of the provinces, including the CM of GB and the PM of AJK, and, more fundamentally, it needed a governance reform that could bind health, education, women’s participation in the labour force and fiscal policy into a single national human-capital agenda, rather than various provincial ones moving at different speeds. LHC to take up PRRA appeal against ‘illegal’ NOC for commercial area That is the deeper significance of the Council. Population is not a sector that can be addressed by a line ministry; it is the sum of how a country educates its children, employs its women, funds its clinics and shares its revenue. Treating it as one national challenge rather than a devolved welfare portfolio is itself the governance reform. It forces Islamabad and the provinces to plan human capital as one country, which is precisely what fragmentation failed to do. That forum now exists. The National Population Council is chaired by the Prime Minister, with the four provincial chief ministers, the Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, the military leadership through the CDF/COAS, and federal ministers at the table—the highest political weight Pakistan has ever assembled around this issue. Beneath it, an Executive Committee chaired by the Minister for Planning, with the provinces, private sector and development partners represented, turns Council decisions into quarterly tracked delivery on the ground, coordinates issues and plugs gaps where they exist without encroaching on provincial mandates. Quality Education Shabana HaiderThe writer is Member Population, Planning Commission, MoPDSI, and can be reached at shabanahaider77@gmail.com

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