ISLAMABAD, Aug. 29 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) released on Monday the data of recently concluded 6th Population and Housing Census 2017. As per the official data, the population of Pakistan's 10 major cities has shot up by 74.47 percent since the previous Census held in 1998.
The population of Pakistan's 10 biggest cities including Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Peshawar, Multan, Hyderabad, Islamabad, and Quetta turned out to be 40.956 million in the 2017 Census, which is 74.47 percent more when compared with that in the 1998 census.
According to the 2017 Census, the population of Lahore surged at the fastest rate of 116.32 percent from 5.143 million in 1998 to 11.126 million in 2017, followed by Peshawar whose population expanded at 100.45 percent from 982,816 in 1998 to 1.97 million in 2017.
The population of Pakistan's biggest metropolis Karachi increased by 59.66 percent to 14.91 million in 2017 as against 9.339 million in 1998. Similarly, the population of Faisalabad grew by 59.49 percent from 2.008 million to 3.203 million, Rawalpindi by 48.84 percent from 1.409 million to 2.098 million, Gujranwala by 78.98 percent from 1.132 million to 2.027 million, and Islamabad Metropolitan Corp by 91.77 percent to 1.014 million from 529,180.
Likewise, the population of Hyderabad jumped 48.49 percent from 1.166 million to 1.732 million, Multan by 56.33 percent to 1.871 million from 1.197 million, and Quetta by 77.16 percent from 565,137 to 1.001 million, the data showed.
As per the latest Census data, Pakistan's total population stands at 207.744 million with an average annual growth rate of 2.4 percent from 1998. The average annual growth rate of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was recorded at 2.89 percent, FATA at 2.41 percent, Punjab at 2.13 percent, Sindh at 2.41 percent, Balochistan at 3.37 percent, and Islamabad at 4.91 percent.
A total of 132,189,531 Pakistanis live in rural areas while the other 75,584,989 are settled in urban areas, the PBS data revealed. The population of rural areas swelled 2.23 percent while urban areas'population grew at 2.7 percent during 1998-2017.
As per the official figures, the male population of the country currently stands at 106,449,322 with the female population at 101,314,780, and the population of transgender was listed at 10,418.
