LARKANA, July 25: Speakers at an orientation seminar of registered medical practitioners on “reproductive health and family planning” on Tuesday stressed the need for increasing female literacy rate to address the fast growing population in the country.

Dr Badaruddin Abbasi, director of the ministry of population, said that Pakistan was the sixth most populous country in the world where population equal to that of New Zealand was being added each year.

“The need of the hour is to attain stabilisation in population growth by reducing total fertility rate, which in Pakistan is higher than Iran, Indonesia and Bangladesh”, he said.

The speakers said that it was quite worrisome that the population growth rate of the world was 1.3 per cent, in more developed countries it was 0.1 per cent, in less developed countries (1.7 per cent), in Asia (1.5 per cent) and in Pakistan it was 1.86 per cent.

“The use of contraceptive prevalence rate in Pakistan is lowered than the entire world which is only 37 per cent,” they said.

They said that in 1961, when the number of primary schools was 44,000 the illiterate population figure was 22 million.

In year 2004, when schools number increased to 156,000, the illiterate population was 52 million.

“Education plays a vital role in dealing with such sensitive issues,” they said. They said that unemployment had increased eleven times from 1971 to 2006.

The number of unemployment people in 1970-71 was 0.33 million and it had swelled to 3.60 million in year 2006 which demand reduction in the population growth rate to 1.3 per cent by year 2020.

Speakers said that at present 35.5 million people were living below the poverty line in the country and 56.9 per cent population had no access to safe drinking water while 78.2 per cent had no sanitation facilities.