KARACHI – Despite a shortage of teachers for the purposes of the housing census in the metropolis, the Sindh government has been informed that the process has almost been completed in all 18 densely populated towns of Karachi, Pakistan Today has learnt. Officers of the city government have been lauding each other over the completion of the census, but interestingly, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its coalition partners in the Sindh government – the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F) and the Awami National Party (ANP) – as well as Sindhi nationalist parties have expressed their concerns that the housing census has been carried out by workers of another political party.
Sources said that the Revenue deputy district officers (DDOs) from all 18 towns in a meeting on Wednesday informed Sindh Chief Secretary (CS) Abdul Subhan Memon that the house-count process in Karachi had been completed by 95 to 100 percent, sources told Pakistan Today. Among others, the meeting was also attended by Karachi District Coordination Officer (DCO) Mohammad Hussain Syed, Sindh Census Commissioner Noor Mohammad Leghari, and Implementation Secretary Asif Haider Shah.
The house count in Jamshed Town has been completed by 100 percent while entries of heads of each family have been completed by more than 60 percent, the CDGK officers told the CS. While congratulating the officers for having achieved their targets well ahead of time, the CS said that each Revenue-DDO was also the Census District and Delimitation In-charge of his/her town, and there was a dire need to maintain close coordination among the team members engaged in the census duties.
“The assistance of law enforcement agencies’ personnel can be sought by the census staff, if needed, in sensitive areas of the city,” sources quoted the chief secretary as saying, adding that Memon also instructed the DCOs to ensure proper monitoring of the census duties in all of Sindh’s districts. It is worth remembering that 20,000 staff, including teachers, revenue and local government’s staff, are performing house-census duties as Sindh has been divided into 35,296 census blocks and 128 census districts.