Pakistan no longer has a population problem

Everything you know about Pakistan’s so-called population problem is based on a static picture of the data that is 30 years out of date. You probably think we have too many children and that our population is growing too fast. That is wrong.

Pakistan – the sixth largest nation in the world – is about to hit a quarter of a billion people in population some time later this year or early next year, and contrary to what you may remember from your Pakistan Studies curriculum, that population number is now an asset, not a liability.

We do not mean to suggest that Pakistan’s population was never a problem. It was. But things change, and we in Pakistan tend to not pause to notice when things have improved. We especially do not do so when noticing such a thing involves analysing slow-moving data, and there are few things slower-moving than demographic trends.

We shall start this discussion by defining some terms, and asking you to jettison the notion that “population” is a problem. More specifically, we want this to be a discussion of demographics: the characteristics of the population, rather than its size. As we will demonstrate, the mere size of a population is not in itself an indication of a problem, and indeed, all things being equal, a larger population is preferable to a smaller one.

No, Pakistan’s problem was two-fold: the composition of the population, and its growth rate, both of which would make it difficult for the nation as a whole to escape poverty. Simply put, it’s not that we had – at any point in our history – too many people. It is that too small a proportion of the population could earn a living, meaning each earner had too many dependents. And given the fact that we had too many dependents because the number of children was very high, that also meant that the population was growing faster than was possible for the government to cater to its needs.

This picture that we just described in the previous paragraph was likely what you mostly knew about both from learning about it in school, and through your lived experience. It was accurate as of about 1995. But sometime around that year, things began to change. The change was very slow at first and was not really discernable until about the mid-2000s. But the change in course has been unmistakable since then.