Pakistan is growing at a pace its economy can no longer absorb. As the country enters 2026 with a population of 252 million, the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26 places the annual growth rate at 2.07 per cent — a rate that adds millions of citizens each year to a state already struggling to provide classrooms, clinics, jobs, water, housing and basic public services.
In a belated but welcome acknowledgement of this national challenge, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has decided to establish and personally head the National Population Council. By bringing provincial chief ministers, regional leaders, and — notably — Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir under one federal umbrella, Islamabad is attempting to signal that Pakistan’s demographic crisis is no longer merely a neglected healthcare issue. It is an economic, social and governance emergency.
In Pakistan, the distance between a policy paper and a policy outcome has always been measured in decades and disappointments. For this council to succeed where earlier efforts failed, we must look beyond high-level announcements and ask a harder question — what has actually changed on the ground?
The most tangible development so far is the drafting of the National Population Stabilisation Program 2026-2035. Led by the Ministry of National Health Services, this ten-year framework seeks to shift family planning from an isolated social welfare concern to a core pillar of development planning.
Pakistan has failed repeatedly because its family planning messaging has sounded imported, coercive or culturally detached
Unlike previous top-down approaches, the programme has begun through a consultative process involving the Ministry of Finance, the Planning Commission, UN agencies and the Population Council — cross-ministerial coordination that has been conspicuously absent for decades. Planned interventions include GST relief on contraceptives, promotion of local contraceptive production, integration of family planning into routine healthcare, and district-level demographic projections up to 2050 through the D4D Data Portal Phase III.
Under this framework, planning officials have set an ambitious target: reducing the growth rate — cited internally at 2.55pc — down to 1.25pc by 2035, a target that will require sustained delivery on healthcare, education, youth development, vocational training, social protection, and women’s labour force participation.
The urgency behind this framework was underscored just this week. Chairing a high-level review meeting on population welfare in Islamabad recently, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif termed the rapidly increasing population Pakistan’s “biggest challenge,” declaring population control a national duty and calling for tighter coordination with the provinces alongside effective public awareness campaigns.
Perhaps the most politically sensitive development is the renewed debate around the National Finance Commission Award. For decades, population size has remained the dominant basis for distributing federal resources among provinces — a formula that can inadvertently reward demographic expansion rather than responsibility.
The federal government has now proposed incentives for provinces that make measurable progress in stabilising growth. If carefully negotiated, this could transform population control from rhetorical commitment into genuine provincial priority — though any formula change must also account for poverty, geography and historical deprivation to be fair and politically sustainable.
The council faces two deeper fault lines — political devolution and cultural resistance. Since the 18th Amendment shifted population welfare to the provinces, federal blueprints depend entirely on provincial execution.
The second challenge is social acceptance. Pakistan has failed repeatedly because its family planning messaging has sounded imported, coercive or culturally detached. The state must speak in a language people trust. That is why the tawazun — or balance — narrative matters, framing the issue around maternal health, child welfare and the Islamic idea of balance between rights and duties. Friday sermons, mosque networks and local religious leadership reach communities that no government advertisement or donor campaign can reach with equal legitimacy.
In many localities, the qari sahib commands the trust of an entire mohalla. Friday sermons shape opinion more powerfully than any billboard or public service message. For years, the phrase “family planning” had been associated with foreign secular agendas perceived to conflict with Islamic values.
Scholars can be presented with Quranic guidance — including the verse from Surah Al-Baqarah that refers to mothers suckling their children for two full years — as evidence that Islam recognises birth spacing for the protection of mothers and children. This is not family planning as population control. This is birth spacing as a mother’s right and a child’s protection, grounded in scripture.
Around 40 prominent ulema, belonging to different schools of thought, endorsed birth spacing as a means to protect maternal and child health at the November 2015 Population Summit, organised jointly by the Population Council and UNFPA in Islamabad. Scholars from across the country affirmed that Islam places the preservation of human life at the centre of moral responsibility.
They did not merely sign declarations and return home. They carried the message back to mosques, madrassas and community gatherings. The results were measurable — evaluation of the Population Council’s FALAH project found that reframing family planning from limiting fertility to birth spacing increased birth intervals by 2.4 months on average and reduced short birth intervals by approximately 7.1 percentage points, with notable effects in rural areas.
Religious scholars in Pakistan are not inherently opposed to family planning. Engage them as genuine partners, ground the conversation in their own theological tradition, and they become some of the most effective public health communicators in the country.
Official projections warn that Pakistan’s population could approach 390 million by 2050 — a figure that would overwhelm every development target in every sector. The early steps taken by the new council are more promising than many previous efforts. But promising starts are Pakistan’s oldest tradition. They arrive with speeches, survive a few quarters of attention, and dissolve into institutional inertia.
The real test will not be measured in meetings or frameworks. It will be measured by whether a woman in rural Balochistan, interior Sindh, southern Punjab or the merged districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa can access reliable information, respectful counselling and affordable supplies without fear, shame or social pressure. Pakistan has shown before that this can be done. The question now is whether anyone in power is prepared to listen, sustain and deliver. Until the last mile is covered, every blueprint drafted in Islamabad will remain just another beautifully written document in a very full graveyard.
The writer is a freelance writer and communications specialist at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.
Email: mqaisar@pide.org.pk
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 27th, 2026