KARACHI: “There are tiny bombs exploding all over the place, nothing on the atomic level yet,” said Dr Mehtab Karim, vice chancellor of the Malir University of Science and Technology, while speaking at an event titled ‘Is the population bomb ticking?’.

The event was organised by the Society for Global Moderation at CMC on Saturday evening.

“South Asia, with over one-fourth of the world’s population, is the poorest region after the Sub-Saharan region but due to the high population growth rate during the second half of the 20th century, it has suffered from a high infant mortality rate, a low level of literacy and endemic poverty,” said Dr Karim.

Discussing high fertility in developing countries in the ‘60s, Dr Karim claimed that most social scientists and experts believed that fertility was generally embedded in cultural and religious factors, which encouraged families to have too many children.

“India and Pakistan have shown concern for their high population growth and have launched family planning programmes in the early 1960s but the current low rate of contraceptive use in South Asia was due to the missing element of proper family planning,” he said.

He added that Pakistan’s family planning programmes had suffered owing to a change in strategies and lack of political commitment.

According to Dr Karim, the population planning process in Pakistan was based on a faulty framework and the population explosion might become a threat to the very existence of the nation which will have 342 million people by 2050.

He claimed that experts had been trying to get the attention of policy makers since there was a dire need for the country to slow down its population growth.

“Pakistan’s population is growing by 2 per cent a year,” he said.

Talking about the youth bulge, he said: “Economic gains are not around the corner. The unemployed youth has to be given jobs, otherwise the ticking time bomb will explode. If it is not defused, economic prosperity will become an elusive dream.”

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2018