A Bad Move

NOVEMBER 2000 - We have willy nilly been pushed into the 21st century and while the world is surging ahead we are still deeply mired in wasting time on non-productive and utterly futile issues. Somehow the more irrelevant the issue, the more attention it seems to generate and since everybody who matters and those who do not, have a hundred opinions on everything under the sun, the sum total is a big zero.

It is against this cheerful scenario that hundreds of workers of the Population Ministry have been slaving away trying to make a dent in the single, largest and deadliest threat to our very existence – our population growth, though having said that you won’t find half a dozen people aware of this. They will however be well aware of what some crackpot said in a gathering in Choa Saidan Shah or what another lunatic did to his children under the pretext of saving his honour. Population control has been very hard to accomplish. Although we were amongst the first few countries to recognise the need for curtailing our birth rate, as early as the 50s and although we had framed a policy by the 60s, the programme, which should have been the nation’s most fundamental mission, fell prey to the whims and follies of successive leaders and policy makers. Thus after nearly half a century, we have achieved less than what we should have, but the encouraging factor is that there has been achievement in spite of so many hurdles. In these days of national depression, this is a rather welcome break.

Amongst the many reasons we have not had the success we should have had – growth rate has been declining and now stands at 2.1 per cent as opposed to over 3 per cent just a little while back, fluctuating political agendas has been a large factor. Every leader or leaderene have had their own vision of population matters and in many cases, no vision at all. Many of us recall with horror that Mian Sahib tossed out a TV commercial prepared by the Population Ministry on the grounds that it was obscene. Of course, irrelevant as this may be in Pakistan’s demented national psyche, the man had not even seen the communication let alone having studied it. His reaction was irrational and based on some email or fax he had received from some pervert who had gone into throes of agony watching the message on TV. It is a measure of our national hypocrisy that those who shout the most and are outraged at the sight of the most harmless thing, are usually degenerates themselves but are shrouded in cloaks of decency. It took courage and some obstinacy to get the harmless TV message ‘passed’ by the big man and the airing continued.

This kind of knee jerk reaction has always hung over the Ministry since it began beaming out messages exhorting the public to reduce the mad, spiralling population growth rate. Since we see threats everywhere, particularly where there aren’t any, the business of population has had any amount of opposition from all quarters, some seeing the hand of the devil in full view here. That, countered to a large extent today, by discussion, exchange of ideas and thoughts and some tactful advocacy of the cause, is good news but other factors such as frequent and sometimes frivolous changes in the programme’s structure, limited coverage, absence of a conducive environment for fertility reduction such as low status of women, have been major mountains to climb. Dr. Nafis Sadik, the Executive Director for UNFPA which is the single largest donor to the cause with US $ 1.5 billion committed already, stated recently that 60% of the world’s poor are women who also represent two-thirds of the world’s illiterates. No prizes for guessing how many reside in our part of the world. Past family planning messages concentrated for many years on women and it has only recently been realised that more than women, it is the men who need to be educated and converted. On top of it, lack of resources has seriously hindered work for the Ministry which has had to juggle objectives with little resources, delayed financial payments from the Finance Ministry and a strange ban (which only those who impose such idiotic measures are able to comprehend) on managerial and supervisory staff. All this has not made life any easier. Most ministries in our set up are known for their inefficiency or lack of productivity but by all records it seems that the Population Ministry has done well. Certainly they are not at all hesitant to share information or point out what they have managed and what they haven’t.

Objectives laid out in the Eighth Plan have been met, which is something. Contraceptive usage went up from 14% to 24% within 5 years, fertility rate, which dropped from 5.9% to 5.4% and population growth rate from 2.9% to 2.6% in the same period. This has been achieved in spite of many problems and means that the long road we have been travelling on finally has some end in sight. Our neighbours who initiated their plans much later, have made greater progress. Unlike us, thousands of their workers, literally armies of motivated and determined workers are sweeping across Iran, Bangla Desh and Indonesia spreading the word and making family planning a success story. This augurs well for these countries because only population planning’s most bigoted critics will not agree but the truth is clear that without curtailing our growth, we will face even worse times ahead and that everything and anything we will do will be nullified if we are unable to stop the swarm of ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-educated and sickly children from bringing everything to an end. This grim picture is not an illusion and those who refuse to see it will be the first victims when the onslaught occurs.

Now the bad news ! The Chief Executive who discovers every hour how many things are going wrong here, in a speech earlier this summer announced a revised population growth rate, down to 1.9% from the 2.1% already envisaged. As a applause-earner, this must have been good but it has sent the experts who are supposed to deliver, excuse the pun, this miracle into a spin. The good general is not short on noble objectives but how this is going to be done seems to be a problem about which he is oblivious. While he has lobbed a challenge at the Ministry the latter are now apprehensive as large scale rumours are afoot that the Ministry’s working will be overhauled. Since the Ministry has done well and is perhaps the only one which has, what senseless thinking wishes to dismantle – and in the process damage at the very least and destroy at the maximum, years of work which has gathered momentum and is showing results. Other than making our donors very vexed, it will have the same effect were a grenade used to clean a china shop. Talk of merging the Ministry with the Ministry of (Ill)-Health are doing the rounds. This is another insane move. The Health Ministry is terminally ill, has been for years. Doctors at government hospitals – no hospitals these, examine and prescribe medicines to 80 patients an hour at speeds that must dazzle the patients too. How in the world will they find the time to examine and prescribe medication to family planning patients? The answer is they won’t and the programme will be dead in a few years time with no one willing to take the blame. Why we can’t let a good thing go on, is beyond me. The Population Ministry is not something the heavens have sent down. It has its shortcomings but the new unrealistic target and the large scale and ill-advised surgery in the wings, is going to be the end of another chapter, unless Islamabad wakes up.