By Xinhua,
Dhaka : Bangladesh seems to face a greater challenge in food and employment sectors in the wake of increasing population that would rise to 205 million in 2025.
Officials in the Health and Family Planning Ministry and the Food and Disaster Management Ministry are worried over the impending challenge as they feel that the population control program needs to be effectively pursued to reduce the growth rate.
“What we are going to face the most ahead is not the food crisis, but population crisis,” a senior official of the Food and Disaster Management Ministry told Xinhua on Sunday.
The official said that despite the government spent millions of dollars on the family planning program, the program has been unsuccessful in recent years.
According to U.S. Census Bureau’s world population projection report released recently, Bangladesh ranks seventh with over 154 million people marking 2 percent growth rate currently.
“If we can’t control the population boom, whatever bumper production we achieve won’t help solve the food problem,” he said.
Mohammad Nasiruddin, a senior officer of the Health and Family Planning Ministry admitted the fact that the birth control program was slowed down recently due to shortage of workforce and motivation campaign.
He said the Family Planning Program in Bangladesh was launched in mid-1970s when some 54,000 Family Welfare Assistants (WFA) were recruited. Each WFA is to visit 250 households in each sub-district to motivate mainly the rural people to adopt family planning methods.
But in the last 10 years there was not any new recruitment. Most of the initially recruited WFAs are closing to their retirements, resulting in the slowdown of the population control campaign.
Nasiruddin pointed out that the shortage of family planning materials largely depend on foreign procurement, absence of service to 17 percent of the population who live in remote areas.
Nasiruddin also said that since condoms and pills are supplied free of cost by the government, many of these are smuggled out to neighboring country.
He said the government cannot make the family planning compulsory because of religious sensitivity.
Rural areas’ people are largely illiterate in the Bangladesh. They think that if they have more children they would have more sources of income because the boys can start working with their parents in farmlands or factories from childhood.
“What shall I do? God is satisfied to give me the children…It’ s a blessing from God,” said poor Al Amin, a construction worker, whose wife Halima, aged 23 was groaning in sick bed at a shabby house in capital Dhaka.
Amin and Halima who are struggling to manage daily meal have got three minor sons and one daughter born in successive years. The children are being brought up almost without care from their parents.
Like Amin’s dilapidated family, there are tens of thousands of such families in the rural areas who are illiterate are producing children as a gift of God without perceiving its implication.
On the contrary educated people in urban areas are quite conscious about their children’s future. They do not like to take more than two babies as they think of their proper education, health and future.
Bangladesh, which has an area of around 147,000 square km, is one of the most densest and poorest countries in the world.