PESHAWAR, Dec 8: Speakers at an orientation workshop on “Population and development issues for the media” have called upon newsmen to spread awareness about family-planning issues in order to check the rising rate of population growth. Media can play an important role in helping people to shun misconceptions about population planning. Only media can convince the people that population planning was purely an issue associated with human beings and was of significance to improve the status of maternal and child health in the country.

“Misconceptions regarding population planning are doing the rounds in the country for long. The people involved in campaigns against population planning argue that it is banned in Islam,” NWFP Population and Welfare Minister Kashif Azam said while addressing the workshop at the press club here on Thursday.

The minister said that it was high time that this issue be debated thoroughly because it was closely connected with the health of mothers, child and socio-economic development of the country.

Organized by the Population Welfare Department, NWFP, in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund, it was attended by officials of the population departments besides media personnel.

“Earlier, I also had reservations against population planning because I was not clear on the issue. Now I have realised the importance of population planning,” he said, adding that the growing population of the country had badly hampered the economic development of the country.

Mr Kashif said that media should help to send a message across that population control guaranteed progress and development apart from ensuring better health for mothers and children.

Director General Population Welfare Department Noor Nawaz said that family planning should be regarded as a human-related problem and not a reality.

“It was mainly because of lack of awareness and misunderstanding on the part of the people that a relation has been created between family planning and religion while, in fact, it deals with maternal health and development of the society,” he added.

He urged print and electronic media to guide the society in the right direction by communicating the right message to them.

“The Almighty has asked mothers to feed their newborns for two consecutive years,” he said, quoting verses from the Holy Quran. He emphasized for completion of the two-year feeding period before conceiving the next child.

Mr Nawaz said family planning played an important part in applying brakes on the fast-growing population. If the population speed remained the same with which it was progressing at present then Pakistan was all set to become the third-most populous country of the world, he remarked.

Najma Sultana, Deputy Director, Population Welfare Department, presented the demographic situation in the Frontier province and said that given the present speed of the population it could safely be estimated that it would touch the 1.04 billion mark by the year 2060. She said the present population of Pakistan is 153.45 million, which was increasing at the alarming ratio of 2.19 per cent per year.