Population refers to the inhabitants of a particular place and employment is the state of having a paid work.
In simple words, the population is the aggregate observation of the subjects in a community that are grouped by similar feature.
If this definition confuses you, do not worry because the further explanation will clarify all these terms to you. But before that, you need to know what is meant by population growth?
The birth rate refers to the annual number of births per thousand population while the death rate refers to the annual number of deaths per thousand population.
The difference between the birth and death rate is known as the natural increase or the growth in population. The equation below represents the above information.
Natural Increase = Birth Rate – Death Rate
This was all about the introduction of this topic. Now, let’s discuss some important concepts regarding population and employment in detail now without further introductions.
Population and employment:
Reasons for increase in population:
One of the major problems in our society is that our population is increasing rapidly but we do not have enough resources to support them.
This causes a burden on the existing resources as well and therefore, overpopulation (when population exceeds its suitable size within a particular habitat) is a major problem.
Some of the primary reasons for high population growth are:
- Illiteracy is causing unawareness among the people.
When people are unaware of the negative impacts of high population growth, they do not understand the need to control the increasing population.
This is a major concern when it comes to the people of rural areas because the educational system in a rural area is not very developed at the moment due to lack of resources.
- In rural areas, there is a high demand for sons.
The farmers in rural areas prefer sons so that they can assist them in work on the farms. As a result, there are larger families in rural areas as compared to urban areas.
- The ideology of some Muslims and the opposition by ulemas is a major factor as well.
Some Muslims strongly believe that “Rizq” (sustenance) is provided by God to each and every soul. Therefore, they condemn the family planning programmes and consider them useless.
Similarly, some ulemas (religious scholars) also condemn the family planning programmes on religious grounds and these hindrances eventually lead to an increase in population.
- After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan accompanied millions of Afghan refugees.
Before understanding this point, recall your information that population growth is based upon birth rate, death rate and migrations.
When Afghan refugees came to Pakistan, they settled in the tribal areas on the Western side of Pakistan. These millions of refugees resulted in an increase in the population of Pakistan.
Moreover, the frequent changes in the government do not allow uniform policies to be followed to counter high population growth.
This takes us to another very important topic which is about the effects of high population growth.
Effects of high population growth:
Overpopulation causes a shortage of resources (such as food and water) because of the competition among the population that increases.
Similarly, problems such as underemployment (people taking jobs that do not reflect their personal training and financial needs) and unemployment (state of not having a paid job) are faced.
This is because a country does not have enough potential to provide jobs to the people according to their skills and capacities. This can lead to drug addiction and crimes.
Further reading:
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Apart, there is a burden on the health sector due to the shortage of medicine, doctors, nurses and hospitals. These problems restrict the development of a country.
The problems assosiated with a high population are summarised below.
- Shortage of resources (food, water and electricity)
- Increase in drug addicts and crimes
- The burden on the health sector
- Restrictions in the development of a country
Now when you know some of the problems related to overpopulation, it is time to discuss how can we manage this issue.
Reducing the population growth:
One of the most effective methods is to organize vigorous campaigns regarding family planning in order to create awareness among people.
This awareness can also be created through advertisement and the effective use of social media. The women of rural areas can be provided jobs so that they pursue their career and early marriages can be prevented.
Moreover, child labour can be banned to prevent the people from depending on children income and as a result, the desire for sons can be countered effectively.
If the literacy rate in the country is increased, the people will understand their responsibility as a citizen and thus, their standard of living can be improved.
If women education is promoted in Pakistan, the country will prosper financially and the problem of overpopulation will be resolved. But, why is that so? Let me explain.
When women will be educated, they will work for their income and they will be less concerned about having children.
They will contribute to the economic development of the country rather than being a burden on the male population. The above-mentioned points are summarised below:
- By creating awareness among the people
- By running effective campaigns and family planning programmes
- Early marriages can be discouraged and women can be educated
- Child labour can be banned
- Literacy rate can be increased
These are some of the points that you should be aware of when talking about how to deal with high growth in population.
What is meant by employment:
Employment is the state when a person works for a specific time and is paid for his work. There are three main sectors in which the employed labour force can be divided.
- Primary sector
- Secondary sector
- Tertiary sector
In Pakistan, the primary sector employs the most amount of people. The primary sector comprises jobs such as farming, fishing, forestry and those that extract raw materials.
One of the reasons that Pakistan has high employment in the primary sector is that the majority of the population lives in rural areas and they practise these activities to earn a living.
The tertiary sector (referring to jobs in which services are provided) also comprises a large labour force in Pakistan. The jobs such as driving, security, insurance and teaching are some examples.
Note: The tertiary sector generates more employment in Pakistan than in the secondary sector.
The secondary sector refers to the development and manufacture of the primary goods to convert them to semi-finished or finished products.
Some examples of jobs in the secondary sector are furniture making, car making, steel making and textile production. This sector requires both skilled and unskilled labour to progress.
Unfortunately, the rate of skilled labour to unskilled labour is low because of the less education opportunities in many rural areas which lower the literacy rate.
Unemployment:
When a person does not find a paid job, he is said to be unemployed. There are many reasons for unemployment and some of them are:
- The technology reduces the need of manpower.
Over the past few years, there has been massive development in technology. As a result, devices such as computers and other automatic machines have reduced the demand for manual workers.
Similarly, the mechanization in agriculture has reduced the need for farmers because machines can do the majority of work such as threshing.
- There has been a rapid increase in the population.
When the population grows at a very fast rate, the rate of unemployment increases because there are fewer development projects and other opportunities to get employed.
Therefore, more jobs need to be created to counter this problem.
- The low literacy rate makes people unable to fulfil the job criteria.
This means that computer literate people are required in many industries but there are very few people who have the knowledge to deal with a computer.
When this the problem, unemployment occurs because the skills of people do not match the job requirement and a mismatch is created.
Due to unemployment, drug addiction and crimes increase because the people get frustrated and they involve illegal activities. Moreover, the purchasing power of people decrease.
When this happens, the production of goods also reduces because the rate at which the people will purchase will be quite often.
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and GNP (Gross National Product) also reduces because the resources remain untapped and people generate less income which hinders the economic growth.
How can we reduce unemployment?
Unemployment can be reduced by starting multiple development projects because they will require both skilled and unskilled labour.
Moreover, the literacy rate can be increased through educational opportunities in rural areas to generate a computer-literate force that meets the requirements of an industry.
For the purpose, training institutions can be set up for young people so that the health, insurance, baking and transport sector can improve.
Migrations:
One of the major reason why the population growth is high are the rural-urban migrations (movement from rural to urban areas).
There are multiple urban “pull” factors and rural “push” factors that are mentioned below.
The urban pull factors are:
- There are greater chances of employment
- The quality of life in urban areas is better
- There are more transport and communication opportunities
- The health services are satisfactory
- There are more entertainment opportunities
The rural push factors are:
- Less crop yield (production) for many years
- Natural disasters such as floods destroy farms
- Limited food production
- Limitations in transport
- Undeveloped health sector
These are some of the reasons why many people migrate from rural areas to urban areas. These migrations create housing problems as land is less to accommodate all citizens.
As a result, unplanned growth of cities occur and slums and squatter settlements (Katchi Abadis) grow. Moreover, pollution increases due to the more frequent use of buses and cars.
Apart, other problems such as a degrading quality of life occur because a high population in cities reduce the food, water and electricity supply and problems such as electricity shortage are faced.
The best way to counter these problems is to promote self-help schemes (small scale projects that allow people to use their skills to develop their local area).
These schemes prevent the people from being a burden on the government and the community problems can easily be countered.
However, there are chances of mismanagement and theft that reduce the use of these schemes because corruption can lead to a massive financial loss for a community.
Khuda ki Basti and Orangi pilot project (Karachi) are some examples of self-help schemes in Pakistan.
Demographic transition model:
The DTM (demographic transition model) is based upon the birth and death rates of a country to suggest a country’s population growth through various stages.
In stage one, you can see that the birth rate is high (due to lack of family planning programmes) and the death rate is also high (less medical facilities).
In stage two, the death rate declines because of improved health facilities, more food production and improved sanitation.
In stage three, there has been a decrease in the birth rate because of women employment, improved family planning programmes and greater literacy rate.
The stage four indicates a stable birth and death rate in the future.
In short, the past, present and future statistics of the total population are shown through the demographic transition model.
The population structure is the percentage of females and males in different age groups and is based upon the birth and death rates of a population.
In other words, the population structure is defined by the organization of genetic variation including mutation, demographic and genetic drift.
Conclusion:
With this, our topic about population and employment has come to an end. I hope that all your questions have been answered and all queries have been cleared.
Some of the topics that were covered in this article are population growth, birth rate, death rate, unemployment, demographic transition model and population structure.
Thank you very much for reading and staying with me till the end. You should practise multiple past paper questions to ace this topic because it is very important from the examination point of view.