July 11, 2003	Friday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 10, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, July 10: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has called upon the people to promote the concept of small family system.

In his message on the occasion of World Population Day falling on Friday, the President said “Efforts aimed at reducing poverty and improving condition of the common people can only be successful if a balance is maintained between population and available resources. Otherwise our efforts at breaking the poverty trap will continue to remain an elusive objective.”

He said measures of population welfare programme complimented by other initiatives had resulted in declining population growth rate from over three per cent for past few decades to its current rate of 2.06 per cent.

It is still unacceptably high, as more than three million people are being added to the country’s population every year, he maintained.

In a similar message, Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali has said the theme for the World Population Day, 2003 “One Billion Adolescents: the right of health, information and services”, was important in global perspective as it sought to highlight various problems of one billion adolescents world over.

The high population growth has serious implications so far as provisions of school, food, health services, housing, employment and basic amenities of life were concerned, he added.

“Today, I would like to re-affirm the complete commitment of the government to the attainment of the goals laid down in population policy”, the prime minister said.