ISLAMABAD, Dec 27: Studies on the 1998 Population Census suggest that Pakistan was passing through a demographic transition as the decline in fertility, possibly propelled by increase in female literacy and consequent rise in marriageable age, would shorten the period over which the per capita income doubles.

This transition to be successful would need massive employment growth as well as human resource development as was the case in some East Asian countries. These views were expressed by Dr M Irfan, the coordinator of the Census Data Analysis Project, executed by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) with financial support of the UNFPA through the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE).

Dr Irfan said the studies confirm that of late Pakistan had registered a sharp decline in fertility, which has been visible since the mid nineties. Literacy and education data show consistency and progress despite rapid population growth. The gender outlook is also sanguine though we have a long way to cover.

Asked about the plea in some of the project studies to delink census data from the NFC award, Dr Irfan said the census had become hostage to political pressures as provincial lobbies tried to influence the count to gain greater shares in the national kitty, more seats in the legislatures and more jobs in the federal government.

Asked what then was the solution, he said, as suggested in the Project studies, we could use the 1998 census count as a determinant of provincial shares for the next 30 years as was being done in India where the 1971 census was made the determinant for next 30 years. This was the easy wayout. Other alternatives were more difficult such as use of some other criteria in combination with limited use of population counts. A more revolutionary way could be the reversal of the direction of flow of resources, from the provinces to the federation; in this case the provinces will be collecting the taxes and the centre its share. But this of course was unthinkable, as we were a ‘strong centre’ people.

Speaking about the strengths and weaknesses of the 1998 census, Dr Irfan said the studies found the census to be better than the previous exercises presumably because of army supervision. So the big count was largely found to be somewhat reliable though one could not be definite.

The difficulties arose in case of other variables due to inherent weaknesses of coverage and content errors and cultural factors inhibiting correct reportage.

There were serious flaws in age reporting. For this reason the study has suggested good training as well as employment of female enumerators for better information extraction from women respondents. Then the editing and processing of the data, particularly where imputation was involved, had rendered some of the data unusable. Population growth figures particularly need to be re-examined if the findings are to be treated with any seriousness.