Renowned academician and social sciences expert Dr Tahir Jamil said certain elements in Pakistan keep resisting population census as they saw it as a threat to their vested interests.
Population census will reveal the truth about the province and locality wise population and will affect the redistribution of national resources through National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, he said.
He expressed these views during his lecture titled ‘Demographic transition in Pakistan: challenges and opportunities’, organised by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) on Monday.
Dr Tahir Jamil regretted that we have become a nation that has a total disregard to data and information. Hence, we were failing to develop and design policies according to real needs of the different segments of the society, he added.
“We have lost huge opportunity that our youth bulge have been offering since last 20 years”, Dr. Tahir said, adding that if we were still not coming up with proper policies to capitalise it in future, it will not be available to us after next twenty years.
He suggested that providing quality education and data based planning were the only way forward to us to remain relevant in this competitive world in the coming years. With the help of his detailed presentation, Dr Tahir Jamil said that the economic growth could be found as a function of demographic transition as it gives you the basis for the maximum use of the population potential.
He explained that the demographic dividend is not itself an economic benefit but provides an opportunity to reap the economic benefits resulting because of it. To materialise such a demographic shift into economic benefit a well thought economic planning is needed to boast the public health education and to provide a suitable environment for saving and investment, he added.
Dr Tahir said that Pakistan’s economic development, health condition and education were not encouraging because of imbalanced population growth. He suggested that the fundamental challenge for a political government was to stabilise the level of population in order to increase the productivity.
Shahid Minhas of the SDPI earlier highlighted the importance of demographic and said that due to non-availability of information about population, the developmental initiatives including in health and education sector have been failed to produce the desired results.
