KARACHI, Feb 8: Speakers at a seminar here on Friday called for planned families and said that the explosive growth rate of population was neutralizing whatever little economic progress was being made by the country.

At the seminar on “Population and Environment,” organized by the Sindh Population Welfare Department in the Civic Centre, they said that while population was increasing at a rapid rate, economic growth was not able to catch up with it which led to increase in poverty in the country.

They said that while Pakistan’s land mass was just around 0.6 per cent of the total land of the globe, its share in total population of the world was around 2.6 per cent, so the population kept on growing but the natural resources available to the country remained the same.

They said that if the population growth was not checked, the country would become poorer.

They said that in 1990 nearly 20 per cent of the people in the country lived below the poverty line (earning less than a $1 a day) and now around 35 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line.

They said that poverty was one of the major reasons due to which the menaces of child labour, selling girls, commercial sexual exploitation of women and children, selling children, who were used as camel jockeys, etc, and all these would be effectively checked if poverty, which was a direct result of population growth, was controlled.

Pointing out that controlling population growth was an enormous task that the government could not cope up with alone, they urged non-governmental organizations to join hands so that the target of population growth of 1.9 per cent could be achieved soon.

They said that the increase in population was leading to increase in pollution as more fossil fuel was burnt, more trees were cut, more smoke comprising deadly gasses was generated which in turn created a green-house effect leading to global warming due to which the polar ice-caps had started melting down and sea level was rising.

They said that if this was stopped or at least controlled many major portions of the low-lying states, particularly island countries such as the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh would submerge under water.

They said that besides the above adverse effects when more trees were cut there would be less rainfall, flash floods and soil erosion in the northern areas, which in turn would lead to shortage of sweet water, which already was scarce in many places.

They said that at other places due to less rainfall less quantity of water came down through the rivers to the sea as was happening in the case of the Indus, the flow of which had been decreasing over the years, due to which seawater was making intrusions into the land and subsoil water in the coastal areas were, particularly in Thatta and Badin districts in the Indus delta, fast becoming saline and once highly fertile agricultural lands were fast becoming barren.

They said that pollution generated by the city industries was entering the sea directly as an overwhelming majority of the industries did not have any secondary treatment facility for their effluents, which were polluting the sea and in turn fish and other marine foods etc, in it.

They said that when people ate contaminated fish, prawns, etc, they would get sick. They demanded that environmental laws be strictly implemented so that the ever-increasing marine pollution could be checked.

The speakers said that similarly the major portion of the municipal sewerage generated by the city was also going into the sea without any treatment as the neither the municipal treatment plants were working to the full capacity nor were they treating the sewerage with 100 per cent efficiency.

They said that due to poor planning, though almost every megacity in the world generated funds from its garbage, Karachi’s civic agencies were spending more than Rs800 million a year to collect solid waste, but still they were neither being able to dispose it of properly at the land fill sites, nor was it being fully utilized for recycling, through which a lot of money could be made.

They said that the city was not getting its due share from the government to develop and upgrade its infrastructure despite the fact it was contributing more than 60 per cent to the national exchequer in the form of different taxes.

They said that the most of the infrastructure — water supply and sewerage pipelines, etc — in the city had been laid a long time back and these had deteriorated and developed leakages due to which at many a places sewage was entering water supply pipelines, which were very close to sewerage lines.

Sindh Minister of Health Maj-Gen Ahsan Ahmad (retd), City Nazim Naimatullah Khan, Ashfaque A. Memon, Ghulam Akber Bhutto, S. Abid A. Shah, Tahir Qureshi, Nasim Shahid and others also spoke at the seminar that began nearly three hours behind schedule.