The Social Arithmetic Behind Pakistan’s Population Growth
By Farzam Talees Bhatti4 min read
Pakistan is now the fifth-largest country in the world by population. Its latest census put the number past 250 million, and it's now close to 259 million people. What should worry leaders more than the total is the trend: the growth rate is going up, not down, even though the country is already so big. Pakistan adds about four million people every year like a whole new mid-sized country appearing inside its borders every twelve months, with no sign of slowing down.
Growth isn't spread evenly. It's fastest in the areas that can handle it the least places where schools, hospitals, and clean water are already scarce see the biggest jumps in population, which only widens the gap between where people are born and where the state can actually help them.
Early marriage is one of the quiet reasons behind these numbers. Pakistan has one of the highest numbers of child brides in the world. A large share of girls are married before they turn eighteen, and a smaller but still serious number are married before they turn fifteen. These numbers have gotten better over the years, but they're still high in rural areas, where the legal minimum age for marriage is not enforced well and rarely leads to real punishment. Marrying young means more years of having children, which is one of the clearest reasons families end up larger, according to the country's own health surveys. It also usually means the end of school for that girl marriage and dropping out tend to happen together.
Underneath all this are social habits people rarely talk about openly in policy discussions. Wanting a son is still common and measurable: families keep having children until a boy is born, because things like inheritance, care in old age, and family honor are still seen as mainly a son's job. The extended family system found across much of the country where children are raised with help from a wider circle of relatives spreads out the cost of another child instead of putting it all on the parents. That quietly makes it easier to keep having more.
Maybe the biggest reason families in rural areas do not use family planning isn't a law or a lack of clinics it is a saying like. "Har bacha apna rizq saath le kar aata hai" grandmothers and elders tell young mothers across the countryside "every child brings their own share of food with them." The idea is that a new baby will always be fed and looked after somehow, so there's no real need to plan ahead or limit how many children a family has. It's not really a religious rule it's more like inherited common sense, repeated so often at weddings and family gatherings that people treat it as fact, even though no religious scholar ever made it official.
What people rarely mention alongside it is that the real religious question is actually debated, not settled. A large part of mainstream Islamic teaching says that spacing out children — for the mother's health or the family's ability to raise them well is allowed, not forbidden, and points to old traditions where this kind of spacing was practiced with religious approval. The government has tried, at different times, to get friendly religious scholars to push back against the popular saying with this other point of view. It has not worked very well, because a grandmother's saying spreads through a household much faster than any government pamphlet.
The government's own plan for this problem, family planning policy, exists mostly on paper, not in real life. The number of married women using any method to space out children has stayed flat for over ten years, far below the targets the government has set and missed first for 2020, then again for 2025. Part of the reason is money to hit its own targets, the government would need roughly twice as many women using some method as actually are, which points to underfunded rural health services more than a lack of interest. Part of the reason is the saying itself, working alongside weak enforcement of the legal marriage age.
None of this is really a mystery. It's simple math that nobody in charge has bothered to fix on time. A country that spends only a small slice of its budget on education, far below what international experts recommend, cannot build enough schools, clinics, or jobs for four million new people every year and it can not expect that number to shrink on its own while early marriage, an old saying about food always showing up, and weak law enforcement keep pushing girls out of school and into motherhood before they're grown. Pakistan does not lack reasons for why its population keeps growing. What it lacks is a government willing to treat early marriage, this old belief, missed family planning goals, and underfunded schools as one connected emergency instead of four separate embarrassments. Until that changes, next year's census will just prove the same point all over again.
• Farzam Talees Bhatti is a Pakistan-based journalist and correspondent writing on politics, society, economics, and current affairs for international audiences. His work focuses on issues shaping Pakistan and its place in the wider world.
farzamtalees@theaisatribune.com
Growth isn't spread evenly. It's fastest in the areas that can handle it the least places where schools, hospitals, and clean water are already scarce see the biggest jumps in population, which only widens the gap between where people are born and where the state can actually help them.
Early marriage is one of the quiet reasons behind these numbers. Pakistan has one of the highest numbers of child brides in the world. A large share of girls are married before they turn eighteen, and a smaller but still serious number are married before they turn fifteen. These numbers have gotten better over the years, but they're still high in rural areas, where the legal minimum age for marriage is not enforced well and rarely leads to real punishment. Marrying young means more years of having children, which is one of the clearest reasons families end up larger, according to the country's own health surveys. It also usually means the end of school for that girl marriage and dropping out tend to happen together.
Underneath all this are social habits people rarely talk about openly in policy discussions. Wanting a son is still common and measurable: families keep having children until a boy is born, because things like inheritance, care in old age, and family honor are still seen as mainly a son's job. The extended family system found across much of the country where children are raised with help from a wider circle of relatives spreads out the cost of another child instead of putting it all on the parents. That quietly makes it easier to keep having more.
Maybe the biggest reason families in rural areas do not use family planning isn't a law or a lack of clinics it is a saying like. "Har bacha apna rizq saath le kar aata hai" grandmothers and elders tell young mothers across the countryside "every child brings their own share of food with them." The idea is that a new baby will always be fed and looked after somehow, so there's no real need to plan ahead or limit how many children a family has. It's not really a religious rule it's more like inherited common sense, repeated so often at weddings and family gatherings that people treat it as fact, even though no religious scholar ever made it official.
What people rarely mention alongside it is that the real religious question is actually debated, not settled. A large part of mainstream Islamic teaching says that spacing out children — for the mother's health or the family's ability to raise them well is allowed, not forbidden, and points to old traditions where this kind of spacing was practiced with religious approval. The government has tried, at different times, to get friendly religious scholars to push back against the popular saying with this other point of view. It has not worked very well, because a grandmother's saying spreads through a household much faster than any government pamphlet.
The government's own plan for this problem, family planning policy, exists mostly on paper, not in real life. The number of married women using any method to space out children has stayed flat for over ten years, far below the targets the government has set and missed first for 2020, then again for 2025. Part of the reason is money to hit its own targets, the government would need roughly twice as many women using some method as actually are, which points to underfunded rural health services more than a lack of interest. Part of the reason is the saying itself, working alongside weak enforcement of the legal marriage age.
None of this is really a mystery. It's simple math that nobody in charge has bothered to fix on time. A country that spends only a small slice of its budget on education, far below what international experts recommend, cannot build enough schools, clinics, or jobs for four million new people every year and it can not expect that number to shrink on its own while early marriage, an old saying about food always showing up, and weak law enforcement keep pushing girls out of school and into motherhood before they're grown. Pakistan does not lack reasons for why its population keeps growing. What it lacks is a government willing to treat early marriage, this old belief, missed family planning goals, and underfunded schools as one connected emergency instead of four separate embarrassments. Until that changes, next year's census will just prove the same point all over again.
• Farzam Talees Bhatti is a Pakistan-based journalist and correspondent writing on politics, society, economics, and current affairs for international audiences. His work focuses on issues shaping Pakistan and its place in the wider world.
farzamtalees@theaisatribune.com
