Renowned academician and social sciences expert Dr Tahir Jamil said that certain elements in Pakistan kept resisting the population census as they saw it as a threat to their vested interests.

“The population census will reveal the truth about the province and locality populations and will affect the redistribution of national resources through the national finance commission (NFC) award,” he said.

He expressed these views during his lecture titled ‘Demographic transition in Pakistan: challenges and opportunities’, organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) on Monday.

Dr Jamil regretted that Pakistan had become a nation without any regard for data or information. “Hence, we were failing to develop and design policies according to actual needs of the different segments of society,” he added.

He suggested that providing quality education and data based planning were the only way forward to remain relevant in the world in the coming years. With the help of his detailed presentation, Dr Tahir Jamil said that economic growth could be found to be a function of demographic transition as it gave the basis for the maximum use of the population’s potential.

He explained that the demographic dividend was not itself an economic benefit but provided an opportunity to reap the economic benefits resulting from it. “To materialise such a demographic shift into economic benefits, a well thought out economic plan is needed to provide a suitable environment for saving and investment,” he added.

Dr Tahir said that Pakistan’s economic development and healthcare and education facilities were not encouraging because of imbalanced population growth. He suggested that the fundamental challenge for a government was to stabilise the level of population in order to increase the productivity.

Shahid Minhas of the SDPI earlier highlighted the importance of demographics and said that the developmental initiatives in health and education sectors had failed to produce the desired results due to non-availability of information about the population.