‘Education vital to check growing population’
By Ali Imran

ISLAMABAD—Federal Minister for Population Welfare, Chaudhry Shahbaz Hussain, has said that education is key to control the fast growing population of the country and the government is focusing attention to raise awareness among the masses.
Media has been playing an important role in creating awareness among the masses and to some extent have succeeded in its goal. He talking with newsmen. he said, “I thing people in Pakistan are aware of the methods of family planning due to media and are accepting this phenomena,” he added.
Responding to a question, he said, the major problem in the past was the gap between the Ministry of population and the masses. The people did not know about the population planning and family planning workers were not motivated. The current government bridged this gap and launched several programs for raising awareness among the people. “We took several religious scholars into confidence who were creating hurdles and arranged many national and international conferences of ulema and I am happy that hundreds of ulema and scholars are supporting the population control program,” Shahbaz added.
To another question whether Pakistan can have a legislation similar to the one in China for controlling the population Shahbaz replied that since Pakistan was an Islamic state therefore it was neither possible to adopt ‘One child’ legislation as China did nor would our ministry support it. “Ours is volunteer program and we cannot force the people to curtail their families, all we can do is to properly educate them about the benefits of small families,” he added.
In this connection, we have announced incentives for the small family and if a family has one child then the government would bear all expenses of education till intermediate.
When asked whether he was satisfied with the cooperation of provinces and local governments in population control program, the Federal Minister said that the federal government was providing funds to the provinces and it was their responsibility to make sure implementation of the population control programme. But unfortunately, the provincial governments had not been fulfilling their obligations. However, he said, that the local governments were cooperative with the federal government in this programme.
He underlined the need for establishing a family welfare centre at union council level and a room for family welfare workers for the convenience of masses.
He said that population in Pakistan is increasing with the ratio of 1.86 % annually, which is a matter of grave concern. “We want the population growth to come down to 1.3 % per Anum till 2020 and hope that the target will be achieved well before time,” he noted.