A country can become a victim of its own fertility. Its classrooms fill faster than it can build schools; its cities expand faster than it can lay sewage pipes; its labour force grows faster than its economy can absorb workers. Eventually, the arithmetic of survival overwhelms the politics of aspiration. Pakistan is approaching this predicament, and much of it remains preventable.

Pakistan’s population reached approximately 241.5 million in the 2023 census, having grown at an annual rate of 2.55 per cent between 2017 and 2023. At that pace, the population doubles in roughly 27 years if the rate persists. The trajectory depends on fertility, mortality and migration, but the warning is unmistakable: Pakistan is adding people at a rate that places extraordinary demands on an overstretched state.

The problem is not that Pakistan has too many people in some abstract, moral sense. Human beings are not liabilities merely because they are born. The problem is that population growth and national capabilities are badly out of alignment. Pakistan is producing future workers, students, patients and taxpayers faster than it is developing the institutions, infrastructure and productive economy needed to give them dignified lives.

This separates demographic analysis from the crude proposition that people themselves are the problem. Yet a rapidly growing population can turn almost every existing weakness of the state into a larger, more expensive and more intractable crisis.

With compound growth, each annual increase becomes part of the base........

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