Suchergebnisse

Pakistan's agriculture is almost wholly dependent on
irrigation and irrigated land supplies more than 90 percent of
agricultural production. Irrigation is central to Pakistan's economy.
Massive investments in irrigation contributed to the development of one
of the largest Indus Basin Irrigation System. Despite heavy budgetary
inputs in irrigation system, it is facing shortage of resources and
suffering from operational problems. The sustainability of irrigated
agriculture is threatened due to problems of waterlogging and salinity,
inadequate operation and maintenance, insufficient recovery of O&M
expenditure, inequitable distribution, environmental degradation,
institutional issues etc. The growing scarcity of water sets the future
stage for intensive competition over water between agriculture and
non-agricultural users. The growing need for food and fibre requirements
of increasing population further limits the per capita availability of
water. Due to the limited prospects for expanding irrigation facilities,
the projected increase in irrigated agriculture will have to come from
significant improvement in the performance of existing systems.
Policy-makers and planners are of the view that Pakistan's irrigated
agriculture requires new strategies to enhance input efficiency and
maintain and improve the quality of the resource base and to get the
irrigation system out of crises. There is a global movement for
searching a new type of relationship between the managers of irrigated
agriculture and farmers. Such options are being considered by government
at various levels to put the system on sustainable development path. In
addressing the environmentally sustainable water resource management in
Pakistan, the paper makes an attempt to provide an over-view of water
resource issues and options.

The main concern of this volume is to explore various aspects
of the research methodology relating to population dynamics. The authors
belong to different disciplines, and in the nineteen contributions here
which are categorised under five major themes, they examine various
avenues relating to the assessment of population issues from their own
perspectives. The first two papers ("Implicit Theoretical Assumptions in
Research Designs" by Hubert M. Blalock Jr. and "Conceptual Models in
Population Studies" by K. Mahadevan) emphasise the need for greater
sensitisation of the researcher to a broad range of implicit assumptions
in the research design for data analysis, and to the utilisation of
appropriate conceptual frameworks for modern empirical research. Blalock
rightly points out the general tendency of researchers to develop what
he terms "intellectual blinders" to overlook the shortcomings of the
design they adopt, and the tendency to stress the weaknesses of the
unfavoured design strategies. He is also concerned about the
generalisability issues when convenience of choice in the subject's
location in social psychology is excused on the grounds that it is also
done by most others. He observes that the exposure of graduate students
to the methodological literature is brief and, in many cases, it is only
a "nuts and bolts treatment" of measurement issues with "a rather heavy
emphasis on whatever technique happens to be fashionable at the time, or
at their own universities, rather than a more thorough grounding on the
nature of the theoretical assumptions that undergird the particular
technique. As a result, they know how to use and churn out research
papers that enable them to display their expertise. But they are not
being trained to examine the approach in question from the standpoint of
gaining a deeper understanding of the theoretical rationale that
underlies it". (p. 34).

Although disability has been the area of concern in the domain
of such disciplines as social welfare and public health, the serious
concern on the demography of disability as an important research subject
has emerged only recently. In the less developed countries where most of
the world popUlation lives, the rapid decline in mortality with little
reduction in fertility, under the conditions of underdevelopment,
nutritional deficiencies, insufficient coverage for health, inadequate
sanitation and safe water facilities, has been contributing to the
increasing number of disabled persons. This is because the availability
of modern medicine, even to an inadequate extent, has contributed to the
reduction in mortality, but many of those who survive become permanently
disabled. Apart from the differences in data collection systems in
different countries and the problems associated with such approaches,
the variations in prevalence of disability are partly attributed to such
factors as differential chronic and infectious disease patterns;
differential life expectancy; the age structure of populations and
population composition; differential nutritional status; differential
rates of exposure to environmental, occupational and traffic hazards;
and variations in public health practice [United Nations. (1990)]. In
developed countries where the increase in life expectancy had started to
occur earlier than the developing countries, the decline in fertility
led to the growing proportions of the elderly in their population. As
the proportion of the elderly popUlation in the total population gets
larger the proportion of the disabled become conspicuous. This is
because in both developed and deVeloping countries the age structure of
the disabled popUlation is predominantly elderly in comparison to the
overall population age structure. It has been observed that in such
developed countries where the ageing process has gone furthest, the
number of disabled persons have increased rapidly. [Okoliski
(1986).]

The main focus of the book is on the description of analytical
findings of a study based on a demographic survey of Delhi conducted in
1970. The considerations for analysis of data collected from 5,624
currently married females aged below 40 years at the time of the survey,
included the testing of several hypotheses on socio-economic factors
affecting fertility behaviour. The book, apart from containing an
interesting foreword by Ashish Bose, consists of seven chapters and
appendices. One of the chapters provides a review of the theories and
issues concerning the factors and conditions influencing fertility
behaviour. Another chapter relates to the demographic literature on
fertility and family planning within India and provides a brief history
of the regional surveys including those which were primarily designed to
investigate various socio-economic, psychological and demographic
variables affecting fertility and family planning.

The paper provides a demographic view of disability patterns
in Pakistan, and also highlights the inadequacies and inconsistencies of
data, especially those provided by the census. Besides assessing the
prevalence of disability by age, gender considerations, nature of
disability and reasons of disability, the paper examines such features
among the disabled population as their work participation, training,
self-sufficiency and dependence on the help of the others. Even though
the estimates of disability worked out from the 1984-85 Survey of
Disabled Population are relatively more realistic, the need for
broadening and standardisation of the concepts and adoption of improved
survey procedures for better coverage and diagnostics is clearly
evident. The high prevalence of disability and the fact that nearly half
of the total disabilities occur due to disease, more than a third are by
birth, and about 15 percent are due to accidents, clearly point towards
the need for preventive and curative health facilities and imparting of
proper awareness among the people. The association of disability
prevalence with the prevailing conditions of fertility, health,
education and socio-economic circumstances, observed from the results
have important policy implications for the country. The study which has
attempted to provide a view of disability patterns in Pakistan, and to
highlight some of the covariates of disability rate, represents a
beginning of a demographic concern in this important area.

Analytical efforts to understand the factors which influence
population growth and the variables which affect fertility behaviour
have become the concern of most social scientists. Studies done to look
at the interrelationship between population growth and economic
development have mostly used the viewpoints of economics and demography.
The economists belonging to different schools of thought have treated
the population question differently: while some of them have treated
population growth as an exogenous variable, others have considered it to
be endogenous. The economist's decision-making model of fertility
behaviour, which considered children as an economic good, was developed
as an extension of the conceptual framework of the micro-economic model
of a consumer's decision-making process in allocating a restricted
budget to alternative uses. The validity of the application of an
economic theoretical framework to household fertility behaviour has,
however, been questioned by many social scientists.

The need for a serious consideration of demographic phenomena
and the global concern for a systematic and continuous assessment of
population dynamics was stimulated by the growing momentum of population
growth, especially in the developing countries. Awareness of the
imperativeness of demographic assessment began to grow when efforts for
social and economic development were systematically initiated in the
developing countries. The process of demographic assessment requires
availability of data about different aspects of population, in
particular, size, age-sex distribution and geographical distribution not
only at a given point of time but also at different points of time. Data
are also needed on births and deaths in the population. The basic and
most important concern is with assessing the base population along with
its necessary characteristics, and with working out the basic
demographic parameters of fertility and mortality. Collection of data,
estimation of basic parameters, and analytical efforts for an
understanding of the role of socioeconomic and demographic variables are
all a part of demographic assessment.