Population growth rate comes down to 1.86%

Islamabad: The sixth most populated country in the world, Pakistan’s population rate continues to slow down.

At the start of this decade, 2010 to be exact, the country’s population grew by 2.05 per cent annually but the percentage declined to 1.97 in 2013, 1.95 in 2014, 1.92 in 2015 and 1.89 in 2016.

And now, as the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2016-17 shows, the population growth rate has further come down to 1.86 per cent.

The population growth rate is often referred to the change in population over a given period of time with a positive growth rate suggesting increase in population and the negative decline in population.

The government has attributed this slowdown in population growth to a constant improvement in health and education indicators along with effective population welfare programmes.

According to the latest Economic Survey of Pakistan, the country’s population, which was 188.02 million in 2014, has gone up to 199.71 million with most of the people living in villages.

The urban population totals 80.72 million.

Encouragingly, the country’s total fertility rate, the average number of children expected to be born to a woman, is on the decline.

Stagnant at 3.2 in 2014 and 2015, the TFR came down to 3.1 in 2016 and 3 in 2017 and thus, slowing down population growth.

A steady decline has also been seen in the crude birth and crude death rates, which are used to measure the growth and decline of population over the years.