Aman named Thomas Austin released 24 wild rabbits on his estate in Australia in 1859 for hunting purposes but “their rapid reproduction and spread, coupled with the lack of natural predators and abundant resources, led to a massive population boom. Within 50 years rabbits had spread across two-third of the continent, causing significant environmental damage and impacting native species.”

The estimated rabbit population is now about 200 million in Australia. Rabbits pose a danger to nature and agriculture because they consume or overgraze pastures, destroy plants, cause soil erosion and damage crops leading to competition with local fauna, and decreased agricultural productivity.

If you have an eerie feeling that the story is meant to remind you in some way of the population growth rate in our country you are surely right. This is exactly the intention. Pakistan emerged as an independent state in 1947. It comprised two wings, East and West Pakistan. The first census was conducted in 1951 which showed the estimated population of the country about 75 million. East Pakistan had about 42 million and West Pakistan around 33 million. East Pakistan got independence as sovereign Bangladesh in 1971. The main reason was that the minority of the country treated the majority as a minority. The minority in West Pakistan that dominated the power structures came up with a weird notion of parity i. e. 33 million were declared equal to 44 million. This is called in Punjabi “Dadhay da sattin viheen sao (a person with power can take 7 twenties as one hundred).”

After the 1971 debacle people in the erstwhile West Pakistan consciously and subconsciously started the race of increasing its population at a neck-breaking pace. Perhaps they wanted to make good the loss they suffered as a result of the separation of the majority of the country. Now they are about 250 million by a conservative estimate. They jumped from 33 million to 250 million in 74 years. Imagine the surge in a country where agricultural and arable land has shrunk. Big swathes of productive land have been turned into residential and commercial areas while the demand for food has exponentially gone up. Real estate tycoons in collusion with the state make a fast buck by selling expensive properties in the name of housing schemes. The end result is that there are more people to feed and clothe in a country with dwindling fertile land and shrinking job market. So much so that despite being an agricultural country we have to import several agricultural products. We import edible oil, pulses, even wheat and sugar.

A large number of our children suffer from malnutrition; they are underweight and have stunted growth due to lack of sufficient food or poor quality food. Rising food prices have further exacerbated the situation. About 26 million children are out of school. One, we are horribly short of schools. Two, the schools we have are short of teachers and other related staff. Three, schools are poorly equipped; they don’t have the required teaching/instructional materials, well-built classrooms, clean drinking water and toilets needed in this age. Private schools, now patronised by the government, fleece parents as they charge exorbitant fees, sell expensive books and school uniforms. Some of the highfalutin schools have even started charging the fees for the interview they hold with the parents of students desirous of admission. They are no-go areas for the children of the less-privileged. The official regulator never comes out of hibernation. It seems to have taken an overdose of opiates.

Most children of the working class who have perforce to contribute to the national economy spend long hours in appalling conditions in shops, workshops, tea stalls, roadside eateries and homes where they suffer abuse at the hands of their uncaring and violent employers. They, in their childhood, lose their carefree time and experience of playfulness. One may ask, don’t the poor produce more babies? Of course they do. A host of factors are responsible for the phenomenon. One, the state has abandoned the poor because they have no social security net at all. They have to be on their own. More children for them mean more hands and more hands means a little more income regardless of human cost. It suits the predatory elites because increase in the population of the poor is an important source of cheap labour. There is so much surplus labour, mostly unskilled, that even a middle class family can afford to hire two or three domestic helpers. The rich have armies of servants at their residences. I remember a dinner I had with one of my friends, a landlord, at his outhouse (Dera) in his village. Five servants served us but the dining table wasn’t cleaned of dust. The impressive line-up of servants merely showed the social status of the host. No wonder about 45 per cent of the country’s population, according to an estimate, lives below the poverty line. Apart from the state’s indifference to the problem there is another ideological factor that adds to the conundrum; babies are thought to be God’s blessing which preempts family planning.

Modern medical science has proved Thomas Robert Malthus wrong. He propounded the theory that population increased geometrically but food production increased arithmetically. Such a situation, he predicted, was bound to result in pervasive poverty, widespread misery and natural calamities which in turn would lead to a drastic reduction in population. But the opposite of what was expected has happened. Some still claim that in the long run, population explosion would prove Malthus right because nature didn’t design the earth to carry this kind of unnatural burden. But “in the long run, we are all dead,” is what economist John Manard Keynes used to say to his detractors who instead of solving the immediate problems insisted on highlighting long-term consequences.

It is sobering to realize that erstwhile East Pakistan, now independent Bangladesh, that had a population of 42 million in 1951 now has a population of 180 million. On the opposite erstwhile West Pakistan which in the same year had a population of 33 million now has a population of 250 million. Do you still disbelieve the story of 24 rabbits? — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2025