 Dear students, in this module, we are going to talk about the population and its remedial measures or solutions. So we have recently been discussing a lot more about the social issues and one of the issues is the population growth or overpopulation. However, solution cannot be materialized in a very ready-made way. We need to find the strategies. Those strategies should be all-encompassing, rather comprehensive approach needs to be adopted in order to curb these manas for Pakistani society. So let's see what can be the way forward in order to control our population issues. The population control or management. This should be the first question. As you know that we are fortunate enough to have a very productive population of very younger ages or younger age groups. We have lesser dependent population and more chunk of productive population. So this can equally has the potential of being converted into the opportunity rather than being a problem for the society. The high birth rate should be discouraged in order to reduce the population size because the higher the birth rate is, the higher would be chances to have a larger chunk of population. And then the effective and successful family planning should be introduced. In the past we have been observing a lot of family planning programs which have been considered ineffective because of the certain issues like corruption and also some resistance from society from an ideological point of view. So we need to carefully design those family planning programs by keeping in view not only the ideological ethos of the society but also the behaviors of the people that what can be the acceptable and effective mechanism for them to adopt these family planning programs. More contraceptives should also be introduced both for male as well as for female. And then we need to have better education and awareness programs because the effective awareness programs can produce a very positive effect on lowering down the population's growth rate. For example, US based population media center gets very creative to reach to women especially. So we can also introduce such kinds of programs like they used radio soap operas which feature culturally specific stories about the reproductive issues and have been heard by as many as like 500 million people in all most 50 countries. And similarly in Ethiopia, 63% of women were seeking reproductive health services and they reported to tuning into these soap opera programs. So by keeping in view those cultural interests of our population, we can also introduce such educating programs both by electronic media as well as through internet. Tax incentives can be another positive factor which can lower down our population's growth rate. Tax policies related to tax exemption can be introduced in order to curb the overpopulation and lowering the rate of income tax for example for those married couples who have the lesser children's can be one of the incentives based better strategies in order to curb down the population growth rate. As we witness that the UK charity which calls the population matters are just government to promote the responsible parenthood which means that subsidies should be limited to the first two children unless the family is living in poverty. So we can also introduce such kinds of policies which can incentivize the population growth rate by saying that we would exempt those families from the tax those who are producing lesser children and then women empowerment can also become a contributing factor because the studies show that the women with the access to reproductive health services find it easier to break out of poverty and while those who work are more likely to use the birth control. You see that the women who are in the employment who are in the professional fields are having lesser children as compared to those women who are in the domestic who are engaged in the domestic household chores. So younger women must be educated to be the advocates for their reproductive rights and also we need to promote the family planning programs by simply educating men and women about the contraception use can have a big impact. For example when Iran introduced a national family planning program in 1989 its fertility rate fell from 5.6 births per woman to 2.6 merely in a decade. So as you can see that if a family planning program is effectively introduced to the population it can have a significant impact on the population. So a similar effort in Rwanda saw a threefold increase in the contraceptive usage merely during the five years of campaign.