Restraining Population Growth Pakistan needs to fix a target of reduction in the total fertility rate down to 2.2 children, as in India and Sri Lanka currently. This will enable a substantial reduction in the population growth rate annually to between 1.1 and 1.5 percent. if this is achieved by the next Population Census, the projected population of Pakistan in 2050 will come down from 403 million to 333 million, a potential reduction of 70 million. 31.2. Impact of the Population Pressure The impact of rapid population growth is evident on the availability of natural resources and access to basic services, as shown below: i) The availability of agricultural land for crop cultivation has declined from 2.5 hectares to 0.2 hectares per capita of rural population between 1961 and 2017. Consequently, farm sizes are becoming smaller from one generation to the other. Yields have not risen sufficiently, and this is putting pressure on the real incomes of small farmers. ii) The availability of water per capita has declined by as much as 49 percent between 1990-91 and 2020-21. Pakistan has already been declared a ‘water short’ country and is on the way to becoming a ‘water-stressed’ country. iii) The access to basic services is declining. In the case of hospital beds access improved between 1961 and 1998. However, the number of persons served per hospital bed has increased from 1440 in 1998 to 1566 in 2020. iv) The population served per primary school has increased from 1998 onwards by 36 percent. Access to middle/ high schools has also started declining in recent years. v) The rate of expansion in the road network has also not kept pace with population growth. vi) There is evidence of increasing food insecurity in the two lower income quintiles of population. Between 2013-14 and 2018-19, the HIES reveals that real food expen­diture per adult equivalent has declined. Food prices are rising faster due to the above-mentioned constraints to higher agricultural output. vii) The unemployment rate has consistently been rising since 1961. It was only 1.7 per­cent then. By 1981 it had increased to 3.1 percent and reached 5.8 percent in 2018. The growth in number of entrants into the labor force has risen at a faster rate than the increase in number of jobs in the economy. This problem has been exacerbated by the‘youth bulge’. viii) The fast growth in urban population has put enormous pressure on municipal ser­vices in megacities, especially Karachi. Today, Karachi has huge problems of water availability, solid waste disposal, traffic congestion and so on. In terms of quali­ty-of-life Karachi is ranked in 2020 by Mercer at 201 out of 231 cities in the world. 325