Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday stressed that maintaining a balance between population growth and available resources was essential for sustainable development, saying that rapid population growth was placing increasing pressure on national resources and posing a major challenge to the country’s progress.

Chairing a high-level meeting on population welfare, the premier stated that population planning must be aligned with national development, economic stability, and the improvement of human resources, according to a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office Media Wing (PMO).

He directed the authorities to convene the inaugural meeting of the National Population Council at the earliest and instructed that its organisational structure be finalised without delay to facilitate effective policymaking on population-related issues.

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The meeting was attended by Chief of Defence Forces and Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, Minister of State for Finance and Railways Bilal Azhar Kayani and senior government officials.

The prime minister announced that he would personally chair the National Population Council, which would comprise the chief ministers of all four provinces, the prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the chief minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, and other key stakeholders.

During the meeting, participants were briefed on the country’s rising population and measures aimed at population control and welfare.

The briefing’s members highlighted plans to link social protection programmes with family planning initiatives while emphasising that women’s education and economic empowerment would form a key pillar of the national population strategy.

The meeting’s participants were also informed that a nationwide public awareness campaign would be launched to promote balanced population growth and family planning.

Participants were further apprised that successful population management programmes were currently being implemented in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Iran.

According to the PMO, the National Population Council, in collaboration with provincial governments, would help implement an effective nationwide population welfare campaign.

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It was further informed that the Council’s Secretariat would be established in the Ministry of Planning.

Pakistan’s population, which stood at 31 million at the time of independence in 1947, rose to 241 million, according to the 2023 census. Last year, however, new figures released by the US Census Bureau estimated the population had crossed 257 million, further entrenching Pakistan’s status among the world’s most populous nations despite a decline in the fertility rate.

According to the United Nations World Fertility Report 2024, Pakistan’s fertility rate has fallen from six live births per woman in 1994 to 3.6 in 2024. Despite the decline, the country is projected to become the world’s third most populous nation by 2050, surpassing the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Russia, with its population expected to exceed 380 million.

The projections are supported by the official Population Projections 2023–50 report, prepared in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which estimates that Pakistan’s population will grow by 59 per cent to more than 383 million by 2050.

On Monday, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal also warned that unchecked population growth was Pakistan’s most critical structural challenge and called for urgent national-level reforms to address the issue.

“No country in history has achieved sustained progress with such a high population growth rate,” he said, adding that successful nations had reduced their growth rates to around one to 1.5pc or lower. He said rapid population growth diluted economic gains.

“If the economy grows at three per cent while the population increases by 2.5pc, the real progress is only half a per cent,” he said, describing it as a major impediment to national prosperity.