The federal government has called an Inter-Provincial Coordination Division’s meeting to address the provinces’ reservations and complaints about the provincial census results.
The census results were released earlier this week following which many political parties, including the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P), Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) and others, expressed their concern and termed the results ‘rigged’.
The Sindh government had also rejected the provisional results of the sixth population census.
Senior PPP leader Nisar Khuhro termed the results a conspiracy against the province by the federal government and said that the PPP government will not let the province be treated in an unfair manner.
PPP Senator Aijaz Dhamra had also rejected the census results pointing out that the population of Karachi and Lahore — the provincial capitals of Sindh and Punjab, respectively — had not shown major differences, which was not possible.
MQM-P leader Farooq Sattar had said that the provisional census results intentionally showed a decrease in Sindh’s urban population.
Sattar also alleged that the numbers in the census report were rigged because he believed that the population of Karachi was no less than 30 million and added that the figures of Karachi city’s population have been tampered with, and they also go against international facts.
MQM and PSP had also announced protest rallies in this regard.
The provincial government had also alleged that Sindh’s population was shown to be less than its actual number in order to not increase the province’s share in the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award.
Opposition leader Khursheed Shah had last week demanded that the data collected by the division and the Pakistan Army be compared to get authentic results.
Shah had also claimed that the government had treated the enumeration exercise as a mere formality, adding that no one was satisfied with the way the census was conducted.
On Tuesday, Census Chief Commissioner Asif Bajwa turned down the objections raised by political parties, and claimed that the verification of ‘each individual’ was ensured.
The chief commissioner also said that the reason why there was not much difference in the population of Karachi and Lahore was that the government had declared entire Lahore district as urban, while two districts in Karachi were still classified as rural.
According to the provisional results, 20 per cent of Pakistan’s population lives in 10 cities. Karachi is the most populous city in Pakistan housing 14.9 million people, which shows a 57 per cent increase in the population since 1998. Lahore holds the second position with 11.13 million people, showing an alarming increase of 75 per cent in its population and is followed by Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and Hyderabad, among others.
[…] Source: Google News […]
Comments are closed.