Pakistan is not short of people. It is short of time. Total fertility has fallen from 4.1 births per woman to 3.6, and contraceptive use has crept up from 27.7 to 34.6 per cent over the same period. Encouraging numbers, until the arithmetic catches up: at this pace, Pakistan will not reach replacement-level fertility until around 2050, roughly 24 years behind Bangladesh, which began its own transition from a harder starting point and got there first.

The national average flatters the problem. Strip it away and the real fight comes into view: urban fertility of 3.0 against rural fertility of 4.1; urban contraceptive use of 44 per cent against 34 per cent in the countryside. Provincial gaps are sharper still. Punjab’s fertility rate, near 3.4, sits well below those of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, both close to 4.0, where contraceptive prevalence trails Punjab by more than 20 percentage points. Pakistan’s targets will be won or lost in these gaps, not in a........

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