Population boom setting development efforts at naught
It's not too late to prevent the disaster. Photo: AFP
AT the current TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of 2.7, the country will have 180 million people within next ten years. The prospect is horrifying. Barren fields, dried wells, shrinking land area, polluted rivers, environmental catastrophes and hunger on a scale never before known by humanity haunt the nation with each passing day.
For reasons like environmental degradation and climatic disruption, as the researchers now point out, food production has dropped drastically. Worldwide water system and aquatic area have been severely polluted allowing diseases to spread and global fish catch to fall by 4 million tons every year since 1990.
Alarmed at the prospect, officials and academics are calling for radical changes in the country's family planning policies. Since Bangladesh introduced a set of birth-limiting policies in the late 80s, the population has almost doubled, with nearly a third of the country's 150 million people wretchedly poor and even more of them illiterate.
With about 30 lakh new births a year, Bangladesh is adding more people to this land-scarce country than others in the region. The problem is assuming serious proportions, especially in light of the density of population that comes to about 1000 per sq kilometer, quadrupling that in India and Pakistan. Experts believe if the country could attain NFR (Net Fertility Rate) of I by 2015, the population figure might stabilize in 2070 allowing 17 crore people to eke out a living with the available resources.
In the backdrop of a bleak scenario with land area diminishing and population figure booming, the economy is in total disarray causing escalation of violence in all possible forms. The city dwellers, especially the affluent section living in the posh areas have played the game otherwise. The rhetoric of containing the population in places where it is so much needed has fallen on deaf years in as much as the people are steeped in ignorance, poverty and last of all illiteracy.
In rural areas, more children means more working hands. Paradoxically, the country's population growth rate that runs at 2.7% and translates into a 3.0 million mouths a year, could in the direst scenario bedevil all development works and ambitious programs that the government pledges to bring in.
In order that population explosion can be contained in the country, there are two key steps that need to be taken care of on an emergency basis.
High investment in education
Educating the adult population is the prime need of the hour. This would help create an awareness in the rank and file of the population about the environmental degradation, climatic disruption, silting of rivers and loss of soil fertility due to build up of sediment and salt over the farm land and also about occurrences like the world economic recession now gripping people's attention.
On the other hand if there is a single key to population control in developing countries like Bangladesh, experts agree, it lies in improving the social status of women. So said Robert Berg, president of the International Development Conference: "Expanding educational and employment opportunities for women is necessary for permanently addressing the population issue." And to bring all these efforts to fruition, the government must make higher investment in primary education by recruiting qualified and committed teachers, along with infrastructure development and encouraging enrolment of students from the neglected areas of the society.
Controlling the rural-urban migration
Unemployment situation in the rural areas of Bangladesh appears to be very bleak. Vast tracts of land in the coastal areas of Khulna, Barisal, Chittgong and Cox's Bazar are now being used for shrimp culture where agriculture was the mainstay employing a bigger chunk of population with fruits distributed evenly among all sections.
The mad rush of people from these areas and neglected parts of North Bengal towards the metropolis in search of livelihood and shelter has given rise to new problems. Struggling to absorb the heavy influx of people, Dhaka has metamorphosed into a heavily crowded city with traffic congestion and labour and other unrests featuring ominously.
The unmistakable message is that villages are no longer able to keep people by providing them with the means of living. If the symptoms have made any thing clear to us, it is that the much-vaunted lofty programs launched by the past governments have not yielded the desired result. Probe must be made to bind why those did not and what has to be done to achieve success.
No wonder the increasing population of the country will have an adverse impact on the economy already in a perilous situation. At the same time middle class citizenry who are often the well-springs of national development and indeed of nation's moral and political fiber have been most hard-hit.
The growing vices of overpopulation are all evident. In recent years, children born of poor parents, having no means to earn a decent living, no facility for education, health care and employment are cruising the streets and market places with lethal weapons and making the lives of innocent people miserable, amply evidenced by the increasing number of daily murders, extortion, drug trafficking and kidnapping of business people for ransom.
Theirs is a dreary universe where life is nasty, brutish and often cut short by violence, disease and drugs. They live without mothers, fathers, without husbands, men without work, families without future, and neighborhoods without hope. They are the country's underclass.
Noting the fact that children are the treasures of society, we should concentrate on educating them. Hopefully the present government has pledged to bring all children to school by 2011. Let us not busy ourselves in counting heads day in and day out, but ensure a better life style for the vast populace country. That would be an effort in bringing down the population boom as it worked in the case of Japan.
Reports have it that with the improvement of economic condition and life style, Japan's fertility rate dropped from 2.14 in 1973 to 1.57 in the 90s. Development is the best contraceptive.
Md. Asadullah Khan is a former teacher of physics and Controller of Examinations, BUET.
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