When I was young, reading facts about the world used to make me really proud. Not only did Pakistan have the world’s second highest mountain in the world, Mount Godwin Austen (K2), but it also was in the list of the top ten most populous countries. For me this meant that we were a strong country. Little did I know that these figures, actually made us weak. High population causes us many problems. Most of these are encompassed within the idea of fewer resources available per person.
If you fancy pizzas, I have the perfect example to explain this to you. If you are 12 people and have enough money to buy a 12 sliced pizza, each of you gets a slice each. If 12 more of your friends join in, each person’s share falls to half a slice. Similarly if the population in a country rises, living standards generally fall, as more people have to share the almost fixed amount of resources the country has. There is however another possibility: what if the extra 12 friends of yours can afford to buy an additional 3 pizzas? Well, that would be awesome; everyone can now have 2 slices each. This does not seem very plausible, given that the 1st 12 people can buy only 1 pizza, you would not expect the next 12 to be able to buy thrice as much. This however might happen in very specific cases in the real world, so it can rightly be said that generally living standards fall as population rises.
Higher population will mean that the crime rate rises, law and order is harder to maintain, provision of good health facilities and education is tougher, courts are stressed, collection of taxes is problematic, sustaining a sound public transportation system gets challenging and so on. Critics might argue that more people will mean that we can have an increase in the number of staff and so not have these problems (we can also collect more taxes, which should make you LOL if you are from Pakistan; which idiot pays taxes?). I have tried to explain this above, in the pizza example: it is hard to catch up with such growing population. In fact, we will need to increase the number of schools in line with population increases. The same has to be applied to hospitals, police forces, road networks and so on. All of this needs heavy financing, and blaming the government alone for not being able to cope with it, is acting blind to reality.
Lets make things clearer here. More people mean that schools are burdened and so our education system suffers. People come out of institutions less capable than they otherwise would have been, and carry on to do jobs this way with lower productivity. This negatively affects all work carried out in the country, with industries not doing as well as they could have. Products are not so attractive and our exports lose their charm. This negatively affects the exchange rate and increases our foreign debts. That is bad news for the economy! The other problems can also be argued along similar lines but before I lose audience I will move on to my next point.
Creating awareness in a larger population is also a harder task, as all those socially active readers would very well know. Without awareness where will the already ‘sky-rocketing’ level of corruption go? “Into space”, is a reasonable answer. I do not think anyone will disagree with me saying that our news channels have helped keep corruption at a ‘relatively’ lower level than what we could have expected. Why media cannot keep it at an ‘absolute’ low is where the link between education and awareness comes in. Being aware means we know what the problem is, but education gives us the tools to solve the problem: to understand that we have to muster that courage and stand up against what is wrong, and to be able to accomplish it in the appropriate fashion.
We therefore need quality over quantity. I hate using this phrase for humans, makes me feel I am part of the savage corporate world, but that is how it is best described. We do not need a massive army to defend us like in old days. We rather need a better-equipped army. The same is true for other institutions for example the police, universities, etc. With current resources, only a lower level of population will be able to help us achieve this. How low should we go is a question to intellectuals involved in research with empirical data, all that I am sure of is that our population figures are just too high to contribute positively.
Educating and making everyone aware of the problems we as a country are facing with higher levels of population is a promising solution. But doing this is asking too much from our already fragile system. There are policies, other than education and awareness that can be used to help reduce our population growth. It might be China’s one child policy; though I would disagree. I will trust the readers to come up with reasonable solutions that they think can help us reduce our numbers and in effect increase our value. After all, it is the duty of each Pakistani to try and contribute to help make our country prosper, or at least that was what I was taught when I was a kid reading those world facts.