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Government to pay clerics to promote family planning

ISLAMABAD: In a move to dilute Islamic opposition to contraceptives, Pakistan announced on Sunday it would pay stipends to Muslim clerics who promoted its family planning programme, state media reported.

The government would pay Rs 1,200 a month to Muslim scholars and prayer leaders promoting family planning, the Associated Press of Pakistan quoted Population Welfare Minister Shahbaz Hussain as saying.

Clerics would also be asked to sign up for a training programme on birth control, Hussain told reporters in Lahore. “The objective of the programme is to tackle population issues with the help of religious scholars in the country like some other Muslim countries (do),” Hussain said.

Pakistan, with 150 million people, has the sixth largest population in the world after China, India, the US, Indonesia and Brazil. President Pervez Musharraf launched Pakistan’s first-ever population policy in 2002, targeting annual growth of 1.9 percent. The rate dropped to 1.95 percent in 2003 after reaching 2.06 percent in 2001.

Muslim clerics mostly oppose contraception as un-Islamic, but there is no radical opposition to it in Pakistan, where couples generally have several children. afp

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