Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Thursday emphasized the urgent need to align population planning with national development, economic stability, and human resource improvement, calling for enhanced provincial coordination and effective public awareness campaigns to control population growth.<\/p>\n
The prime minister, chairing a high-level meeting regarding population welfare in the country, said that rapidly growing population was the country\u2019s biggest challenge and measures for population control and welfare must be treated as a national duty.<\/p>\n
Calling the balance in population a sole guarantor for sustainable national development, he directed authorities to convene a meeting of the National Population Council at the earliest.<\/p>\n
During the meeting, the relevant officials briefed the prime minister on the country\u2019s demographic trends, population welfare initiatives, and preparations for the National Population Council meeting.<\/p>\n
It was informed that the council\u2019s meeting would be convened soon, bringing together the chief ministers of all provinces, Gilgit-Baltistan, the prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and representatives of all relevant institutions and stakeholders to formulate a comprehensive national strategy.<\/p>\n
It was told that the operating procedures for the National Population Council Secretariat have been finalized, and the National Stabilization Plan 2026\u20132035 was currently being prepared, which would present a unified national framework to curb the rate of population growth, setting a target to reduce the current growth rate from 2.55% down to 1.25% by the year 2035.<\/p>\n
Under the new population stabilization framework, priority will be given to healthcare, education, youth development, increasing female labor force participation, vocational training, and social safety nets. Moreover, work has commenced on linking several federal social protection initiatives directly to population welfare goals.<\/p>\n
Federal ministers Ahsan Iqbal, Ahad Khan Cheema, Syed Mustafa Kamal, and Attaullah Tarar, along with senior government officials attended the meeting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Thursday emphasized the urgent need to align population planning with national development, economic stability, and human resource improvement, calling for enhanced provincial coordination and effective public awareness campaigns to control population growth. The prime minister, chairing a high-level meeting regarding population welfare in the country, said that rapidly growing population […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-557882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-top-news"],"yoast_head":"\n