Dr Shabana Safdar Khan
Pakistan adds nearly seven million people to its population every single year. With an annual growth rate of 2.55 percent, this expansion relentlessly presses down on infrastructure that was already struggling before the new arrivals came. Roads, schools, hospitals, water systems, and power grids built for smaller populations are asked to serve ever-larger ones, and the gap between what exists and what is needed keeps widening with every passing year.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has publicly described this growth rate as an alarming trend. His concern is well-founded. When a country’s population grows faster than its economy, the GDP gains that governments celebrate in press conferences are quietly cancelled out before ordinary citizens can feel them. Natural resources come under greater strain. Public services become thinner and more stretched. The Prime Minister has repeatedly called for population control and for turning the country’s large youth population into productive economic contributors. His government has launched programmes aimed at youth employment, including business loan schemes. Yet the budget for 2026-27 allocates only one hundred million rupees to youth business loans, a sharp reduction from the four hundred million rupees budgeted the previous year. The rhetoric of investing in youth and the reality of budget allocations are moving in opposite directions.
Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb has gone further than the Prime Minister in his language, calling population growth an existential threat to Pakistan. That is not a phrase used lightly in official discourse. It signals genuine alarm at the highest level of economic policymaking. The Finance Minister has echoed concerns about population growth cancelling out economic gains, driving widespread child stunting, and denying millions of children access to basic education. And yet, when one examines the budget documents for 2026-27, the National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination Division shows no specified allocation for population control. The words say existential threat. The budget says nothing at all.
The standard explanation offered for this gap is that health was devolved to the provinces through the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment in 2010. The federal government, the argument goes, is no longer responsible for funding population planning. But this explanation dissolves under scrutiny. If population growth presents an existential threat to the country, the federal government cannot simply wash its hands of the problem on procedural grounds. And the provinces, who now carry this responsibility, are demonstrably not meeting it. No provincial budget reflects the urgency that federal ministers express in their speeches. The responsibility has been transferred. The action has not followed.
There is a structural reason for this provincial indifference that goes to the heart of how money is distributed in Pakistan. The National Finance Commission award, unchanged since 2010, assigns eighty-two percent weight to population when calculating each province’s share of the divisible pool. This means that a higher population directly translates into a larger provincial revenue share and a larger claim on federal jobs. The incentive structure, in other words, actively rewards population growth. Provinces that successfully reduce fertility rates would, under the current formula, receive smaller shares of national resources. No government, provincial or federal, will pursue population control with genuine commitment while the fiscal architecture punishes them for succeeding.
This is the core contradiction that policymakers have avoided addressing for fifteen years. The federal government calls population growth an existential threat while the NFC award treats population size as the primary measure of a province’s entitlement. These two positions cannot coexist indefinitely. The federal and provincial governments must revisit the NFC award and build consensus around reducing the weight assigned to population by at least fifteen percent. That single structural change would alter incentives fundamentally and create the conditions under which population planning could become a genuine provincial priority rather than an unfunded afterthought.
Pakistan’s neighbours offer instructive lessons. India has brought its fertility rate down to 1.9 percent, below the 2.1 percent replacement level required for population stabilisation. This achievement was accomplished through voluntary family planning and improved healthcare access rather than coercive measures. Bangladesh has achieved a comparable result, with its fertility rate now at or near replacement level, again through voluntary family planning combined with deliberate investment in women’s empowerment. Neither country imposed its will on citizens. Both invested in education, healthcare, and female agency and let demographic change follow naturally.
The sharpest difference between Pakistan and these two countries lies in literacy. Pakistan’s literacy rate stands at approximately 63 percent. India’s is around 77 percent. Bangladesh’s is approximately 79 percent. Education and fertility are deeply connected. Where women are educated, birth rates fall. Where girls stay in school, families become smaller. This relationship is one of the most consistent findings in development economics and Pakistan’s budget priorities consistently ignore it.
Education too was devolved in 2010 and the provinces have neither allocated sufficient funds nor demonstrated the institutional capacity to treat the sector with the urgency it demands. The federal government cannot use devolution as a permanent excuse for disengagement from both education and population planning while simultaneously describing the consequences as existential.
Pakistan faces a choice. It can continue producing alarmed statements while budgets remain silent and the NFC formula rewards growth. Or it can begin the difficult conversations about revising the award, increasing provincial education spending, and building voluntary family planning into provincial health strategies. One path leads deeper into the crisis. The other requires political courage that has so far been conspicuously absent.
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