Iranians have rejected supreme leader’s plan to increase the population
The recently published 2019 official statistics of death and birth rate in Iran shows that the population growth rate in the country has reduced to less than one percent.
According to the report, the population growth rate was increasing from 2001 to 2015, but after 2015, the birth rate witnessed a heavy drop to a point that in 2018, there was an 8 percent drop in the birth rate which was unprecedented in the past two decades.
This is despite the Leader Ali Khamenei’s project to increase Iran’s population to over 100 million. In recent years the regime has heavily promoted more children and some regime officials including the leader even claimed that the previous initiative to reduce the population growth rate could have been the enemy’s plan to weaken Iran.
Moreover, in the first six months of 2019, the birth rate has witnessed a 13 percent decrease compared to the same period in 2018. In 2019, there have been 1,196,135 births documented.
The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution has stated that based on the assessments, the current population growth rate of Iran is less than one percent, and it is projected to drop even more in the upcoming years.
Saleh Ghasemi, a person referred to as a “researcher on population issues” by the regime’s Mehr News Agency, has stated: “With the current trend, in the next 20 to 25 years, Iran’s population growth rate will drop to zero. Our birth rate is the lowest among the Muslim countries and if this trend continues, in the next three decades we will lose our central role in the Islamic world.”