Islamabad: The population of Pakistan now stands at 207 million, according to the official results of the last survey.
The country’s population, as per final results of census 2017, “is 207.68 million with a population growth rate of 2.40 per cent from 1998 to 2017,” the country’s statistical authority said on Wednesday.
More than 106.3 million people in Pakistan are men and 101.3 are women, according to the 2017 census data released by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS). The number of transgender persons in the country is 21,744. More than 60 per cent or 132 million Pakistanis reside in the rural region while the urban population is 75.6 million.
The final results of the survey were released after more than three years due to objections from Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.
Based on the latest figures, Pakistan is now the sixth most populous country in the world after China, India, the United States, Indonesia and Brazil. However, some global surveys have estimated Pakistan’s population to be over 220 million.
Which province is the most populous?
Punjab is the most populated province with approximately 110 million people in the latest census as compared to 73m people in the province in the 1998 survey. Sindh, which recorded a population of 30m in the last survey, is now home to 47.85m people in the 2017 census.
The population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa swelled to 30.5m in 2017 while the number of people in the northwestern erstwhile FATA (now merged with KP) increased to 4.99m. The population of Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but least populated province, almost doubled to 12.34m in the 2017 survey from 6.5m in 1998. Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) witnessed a rapid demographic change from 0.81m in 1998 to 2 million in the latest census.
The population of excluded areas, Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), in the 2017 survey is estimated to be 6.5 million. GB is home to an estimated 2 million people and Kashmir to 4.5 million.
Most populated cities of Pakistan
Pakistan’s commercial capital of Karachi is the most crowded city with more than 16 million people, followed by the cultural capital of Lahore with 11 million residents.
Lahore: 11 million
Faisalabad: 7.8 million
Rawalpindi: 5 million
Hyderabad: 2.1 million
Languages and religions
According to the census results, 7.08 per cent of the people declared Urdu as their mother language, 38.78 per cent Punjabi, 18.24 per cent Pashto, 14.57 per cent Sindhi, 12.19 per cent Seraiki, 3.02 per cent Balochi, 2.44 per cent Hindko, 1.24 per cent Brahvi, 0.17 per cent Kashmiri and 2.26 per cent others.
According to the 2017 Census, Muslims make up 96.4 per cent of Pakistan’s population, Hindus 1.7 per cent, Christians 1.2 per cent, Ahmadis 0.09 per cent, and other minorities 0.43 per cent.
