SINDHUNIVERSITYRESEARCHJOURNAL(SCIENCE SERIES) An Appraisal of Population Growth Rate through ESDA in Bahawalpur District, Pakistan S. ARSHAD, A.A. KHAN, I. BUTT*, M. FATIMA Department of Geography, Islamia University Bahawalpur, Pakistan Received 08 th April 2019 and Revised 26 th October 2019 1. INTRODUCTION Population growth is the major determining factor of regional development but growth rate and doubling time are not same everywhere and all the time (Debbarma, et al., 2018). Every sector of government needs accurate information about past and present data of population and resources because population growth rate plays a central role in forecasting the trends of future population growth and become beneficial for urban planners (Sibly and Hone 2002). Based on the previous year size of population, it refers to per capita growth of population and represented by ‘r’ is used as a key for future projections (Sibly and Hone 2002; Apenteng 2009). (UN 2019) defines the term population growth as ‘Average annual rate of change of population size during a specific period of time and expressed as percentage’. The estimation of population growth rate depends upon census or other demographic data. However, census method possesses significant statistical power for high density regions. (Wunsch, et al., 2005). According to khan (2011) Globally population growth is measured by subtracting crude death rate from the crude birth rate. Relative population growth is measured in rate of growth or percentage. The most common measure of population growth is annual rate of increase or decrease. Natural increase or decrease rate is the difference between crude birth and death rate. Rate of natural increase can also be calculated by subtracting deaths from births and dividing by total population of that specific year (Clarke 1972). Relative population growth is expressed as: 2 − 1 1 ∗  × 100 Where Pt2 is the population of previous year, Pt1 is the population of recent year. Net migration rate can also be added to the above formula for better results. Positive growth rate expresses population increment while negative growth rate indicated population decline. Moreover, it can also be zero which indicated same number of people at two time (Khan 2011). (Wunsch, et al., 2005) describes that average growth rate of countries vary from -1% per annum +3.5% but within smaller regions growth rates can have many variations for several reasons in the form of rapid increase or decline. However, in less developed countries growth rates of cities is observed to be higher as compared to rural areas due to migration and may increase more than 4%. Likewise growth rate, population density of the regions also varies from region to region depending upon the scale of measurement. (Zhang et al., 2014) also discusses scale as basic parameter to measure the population density because large spatial scale can only give a macro pattern of population distribution. Therefore selection of minimum spatial scale is very essential to understand the distribution of population. Researches explain county level to be more appropriate for analyzing population distribution rather than Abstract: Exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) is one of the recently developed techniques in GIS used to analyze the statistical characteristics and spatial heterogeneity of population data. Current research is focused on the examination of spatial patterns of population growth rate in Bahawalpur district of Pakistan. Based on census data at union council level of the district, the present study uses specific techniques of ESDA including spatial autocorrelation and Moran’s Index to analyze the distribution and concentration of population. Keeping in view the research objectives, paper is divided in two sections. The first section deals with the analysis of spatial distribution of population growth rate at a specific interval size. The second part of the research deals with the application of spatial autocorrelation to examine the spatial clustering of population growth in the district. The results of the study show the spatial clustering of population growth rate in the northern part i.e. Bahawalpur city. The study concludes that uneven and non- random population distribution is not the result of random chance and is associated with various factors. The study can be beneficial for population planning authorities to identify the major clustered areas of high and low population growth for planning and regional development of the area. Keywords: Population Growth Rate, Spatial Autocorrelation, Moran’s Index, ESDA. SindhUniv. Res. Jour. (Sci. Ser.) Vol. 51 (04) 733-740 (2019) http://doi.org/10.26692/sujo/2019.12.116 Email address: ibtisam.geog@pu.edu.pk * Department of Geography, University of Punjab Lahore, Pakistan