Pakistan’s population explosion is not a distant abstraction but a daily calamity for the children who already stand at the margins of society. Those born into ultra-poor households, raised in environments where hunger and neglect are constants, are the ones who suffer most when the tide of new births swells unchecked. Their lives, already strained by poverty, are multiplied in misery by the sheer weight of numbers. Every new child born into poverty does not simply add to the population; it deepens the crisis for those who were already struggling to survive.
In the slums of our cities and suburban peripheries, children grow up in households where food is scarce, clean water is nonexistent, and healthcare is a distant dream. Malnutrition is not an occasional misfortune but a daily reality. Stunted growth, weakened immunity, and diminished cognitive ability are the silent companions of these children. For them, the population surge is the reason their meagre share of food becomes even smaller, the reason their mothers cannot afford medicine, the reason their lives are defined by hunger. When families already unable to feed two or three children continue having more, the suffering of each child is multiplied.
Education, the one hope that could lift these children out of despair, collapses under the weight of numbers. Already, schools are overcrowded, teachers are exhausted, and millions of children remain out of school altogether. When additional children continue adding up, the strain on classrooms and families becomes unbearable. This further leaves the poorest families with little hope that education can ever break the cycle of poverty. Consequently, for those trapped in ultra-poverty, the dream of literacy is extinguished before it begins. A child who might have had a chance to learn is instead pushed into labour or forced to beg on the streets. Their childhood is stolen, their dignity eroded, their future foreclosed.
The psychological toll is equally devastating. Children raised in overcrowded slums absorb hopelessness as their inheritance. They see violence, crime, and exploitation as normal. They grow up believing that upward mobility is impossible, that their lives are destined to be short and hard. When opportunities are scarce and competition fierce, children from ultra-poor households are pushed further to the margins, with their individuality erased and their humanity reduced to statistics.
The scale of this crisis is confirmed by multiple studies. The National Commission on the Rights of the Child, in its 2024 State of Children report, noted that nearly 40 per cent of Pakistani children live below the poverty line, with malnutrition and lack of education disproportionately affecting the poorest households. UNICEF warns that almost half of Pakistani children under five are stunted, a figure that rises sharply among families living in extreme poverty.
UNESCO estimates more than 22 million Pakistani children are out of school, most of them from households already trapped in poverty. Doctors writing in the Pakistan Postgraduate Medical Journal describe overpopulation as a shadow over the country’s social and healthcare systems, with children bearing the brunt.
The children of Pakistan trapped in ultra-poverty are not collateral damage of overpopulation; they are the very future of the nation
The daily lives of children from ultra-poor households illustrate this collapse vividly. In various peripheral katchi abadis in the vicinity of almost all urban and suburban centres, children scavenge through rubbish heaps for scraps of food or recyclable material. In rural Sindh and southern Punjab, girls are kept at home to fetch water and care for siblings, while boys are sent to fields or workshops. In the northern districts, children walk miles to reach schools that barely function, only to return home to families too poor to afford books or uniforms. These are not isolated stories but the lived reality of millions.
Healthcare is another arena where children trapped in ultra-poverty are abandoned. Public hospitals remain overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. Mothers with malnourished infants wait for hours only to be turned away. Preventable diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia claim thousands of young lives every year. The World Health Organisation has warned that Pakistan’s health system is unable to cope with the demands of its growing population, leaving the poorest children most exposed.
The national consequences of this neglect are profound. A country that fails its children fails itself. Pakistan’s demographic surge is often described as a potential dividend, a youthful population that could drive economic growth. But for children from ultra-poor households, there is no dividend, only disaster. A workforce deprived of education and health cannot drive productivity. Millions of frustrated youth, denied opportunities, become susceptible to crime, extremism, and unrest.
Pakistan’s failure to sustain population control programmes has worsened this crisis. Early family planning initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s were treated narrowly as health interventions rather than as part of a broader development agenda. Successive governments failed to maintain continuity, and political sensitivities, lack of funding, and weak institutional commitment caused programmes to vanish as if population growth were not a challenge to be dealt with. The absence of a coherent and sustained policy has left Pakistan vulnerable to the demographic pressures that now overwhelm its social and economic systems.
Other countries in Asia offer instructive models worth emulating. Malaysia steadily reduced fertility from around four children per woman in the 1980s to below two in recent years by integrating family planning with maternal health, education, and women’s workforce participation. Indonesia moved from very high fertility in the early 1970s, above five children per woman, to just above two today through a flagship community approach known popularly as “two children are enough,” delivered by village-level health workers and local leaders. Bangladesh, despite comparable cultural and socio-economic realities to Pakistan, reduced fertility from almost seven children per woman in the early 1970s to nearly two now by combining door-to-door family planning outreach, strong civil society partnerships, and consistent government backing.
The takeaways for Pakistan are concrete. Family planning must be embedded into primary healthcare so that every antenatal and postnatal visit includes counselling, method choice, and follow-up, with stock reliability tracked at the facility level. A paid cadre of female community health workers should deliver doorstep counselling and short-term methods, with clear referral pathways for long-acting and permanent methods at the nearest health facilities.
Behavioural messaging that normalises two-child and three-child family sizes, tailored by province and endorsed by respected religious scholars, can reduce social resistance. Linking cash transfers and school stipend programmes to spacing and girls’ education is a proven fertility reducer. Finally, systematic continuity across political cycles remains integral to ensure that family planning remains a core development service rather than a discretionary add-on.
The children of Pakistan trapped in ultra-poverty are not collateral damage of overpopulation; they are the very future of the nation. To ignore their plight is to embrace decline. Unless urgent steps are taken to boost family planning practices, the nation will drown under the weight of its own neglected future. The tragedy is visible, the solutions are known, and the urgency is undeniable. Pakistan must choose whether it will continue to produce millions of children condemned to misery or whether it will finally honour its responsibility to nurture them. The fate of the nation depends on that choice.