Danger of population growth beyond limits

At a time when election, referendum and lease of seaports hog newspaper headlines, some highly important issues receive scant attention. One such issue is population growth in a country that is already gasping for breath under the weight of an outsize people. According to a survey, "Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey" conducted jointly by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), the country's population is now growing at 2.4 per cent. Called total fertility rate (TFR) in demographic parlance, it stood at 2.3 during the 2010-2022 period. What is particularly worrying is that the trend of population growth never rose before. But now the rate is going up.

Introduced in the 1950s, family planning (FP) did not gain momentum until it was declared as a government-sector programme in 1965. The policy to curb fertility rate was followed by successive governments before and after independence. But the FP received fresh impetus with the government declaring population boom as the number one problem in the country in 1976. Multi-sectoral FP programmes were launched to curb the undesirable rate of population growth. Young people aged between 15 and 29 years constitute about 28 per cent of the population.

They are the crucial segment of the population. According to government statistics 40-41 per cent youths in the country are neither in education nor in employment, nor training (NEET). Remarkably, the NEET for girls is much higher at around 61.7 per cent compared with 18.59 for males. Quite understandably, underage girls are married off and this is one of the reasons for the current higher rate of TFR. However, the main reason for the reverse trend of population growth is the stymied FP activities in the country. The momentum generated in the 1990s has lost its way in the wilderness following the casual government approach to FP.    

Indeed, people became aware of the danger of many mouths in a family courtesy of FP campaign but government inaction and the latest fund constraint have also restrained the non-government organisations (NGOs) to continue their programmes. Aid and assistance in general from Western countries have drastically shrunk ever since the Covid-19 pandemic. Family planning has particularly become a victim of this global fund shortage. Now, the number of family welfare visitors (FWVs) has dwindled with no fresh recruitment of such field-level workers who deliver services to rural women of child-bearing age. At the grassroots level, 18 per cent areas in the country have no such FWVs. A large number of posts is vacant at the upazila level. The supervisory activities suffer affecting adversely the delivery of FP services.

The proverbial ostrich-like attitude towards population explosion will be of no help to reduce the population growth rate already in a reverse gear. Before the growth rate reaches the dangerous trajectory, the government must allocate a reasonable amount of fund for activating the apparatuses of FP. One plus point is that the system in the past has worked well if not at the highest satisfactory level. The vacant posts have to be filled for resuscitating the chain of delivery services at the grassroots level.

The investment is likely to give returns in spades. This is necessary because successes in all other areas hinge on the population size which right now is more than this small land can support. With the climate change aggravating, its support systems will be further stretched. If the rising seas take away a significant slice of coastal areas, the country will be in dire straits. A single-child family would be an ideal solution for the nation. Even if it is not the norm, at least two-children family had to be promoted in order to maintain a balance in the land-demography-food ratio.

In a situation like this, the government can ill afford the inattention to the family plan programmes. Both promotion of the principle of keeping the family size small and the pooling of fund for delivery of FP services to the target people have to be ensured as soon as possible.      

nilratanhalder2000@yahoo.com