Population Explosion Threatens Future of Beleaguered Pakistan : Birth control: Severe overcrowding, social unrest and food shortages may be ahead, experts say. Conservative attitudes hamper family planning.

Advertising of condoms was recently forced off television, some birth-control centers have closed because of lack of funds and Pakistan’s population is exploding.

Officials with international aid organizations say shortsighted politicians, conservative Islamic attitudes toward family planning and high levels of illiteracy are driving this predominantly Muslim nation of at least 110 million people toward a population disaster.

“The magnitude of the population problem in terms of social and economic development is unbelievable,” said Bal Gopal, country director for the United Nations Population Fund.

Dire overcrowding, rising social unrest and food shortages could be ahead, aid experts say. The literacy level, now about 26%, is dropping.

Failure to control population growth, which at 3.2% a year is the highest in southern Asia, could lead to a national catastrophe, Gopal added.

In September, 1989, then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was given a report showing that Pakistan’s population would soar to more than 300 million by 2020 if the current fertility rate--six or seven children for the average woman--is not reduced.

The report, by the National Institute of Population Studies and the government’s own population welfare staff, says the number of people in Karachi, the country’s biggest city, could quadruple to 30 million in the same period.

That would make it far larger than any city in the world today.

The report called for extensive government action, including a strong commitment by the nation’s leaders to population control, the provision of family planning services through all health outlets and increased funding.

But family planning workers say that 16 months later none of this has occurred, and in some ways the atmosphere has worsened.

“There has been a definite slackening off in progress. We need more government support,” said Dr. Najma Jahangir, a family planning specialist in the city of Rawalpindi.

“The women want birth control badly but the resources and the will are not there to give it,” she said.

Jahangir, who works for a women’s welfare group called the Behbud Assn. of Pakistan, said four of the group 12 clinics have closed recently because of budget cuts.

The government has reduced the fuel available for visits to isolated areas by family planning workers since the Persian Gulf crisis began, she said.

“The situation is very depressing. Sometimes I think it is no use doing all this,” she said. “Although I am helping a woman on a personal level, I do not think I am helping the country as a whole.”

Among the reasons women do not seek birth control advice are a lack of transportation to clinics, the opposition of family elders and illiteracy, Jahangir said.

Opposition to birth control from Islamic fundamentalist scholars and village clergy is a significant influence.

“We think family planning programs will bring ruin, both in religious and worldly senses,” said Qazi Abdul Latif, a member of the Senate and an orthodox Muslim scholar spearheading the strengthening of the Islamic faith in Pakistan.

“More population means more manpower. With more manpower, Pakistan can be made an invincible fortress of Islam,” he said.

A billboard campaign being introduced by the Population Welfare Ministry has such slogans as “Two-child families are happy families” and “Keep the speed of the car and the children slow.” But it makes no mention of how to achieve either.

Gopal that said population control is not a priority with the politicians in Islamabad because results take so long to achieve. “Politicians like to see what will happen in the next election or next year,” he said.

The National Institute of Population Studies report spelled out some of the implications of unchecked population growth for Pakistan’s resources.

By 2018, it said, there would need to be an additional 6,400 health units, 116,000 more hospital beds, 66,000 extra doctors and 119,000 more paramedics just to keep today’s level of services.

However, both Gopal and M. S. Jillani, the Population Welfare Ministry’s senior official, are hopeful they can boost the use of birth control.

Jillani intends to use the country’s extensive child-immunization program to push birth control.

“The solution in this country is population control. It is the solution to everything,” said businessman M. S. Habib, who is president of the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry.