KARACHI – The federal and Sindh governments have yet to develop a policy to exclude illegal immigrants living in the province from the first phase of the census that is starting on Tuesday, sources have said. Through several reports, the federal government has admitted that over 2 million illegal immigrants are living in Sindh, including the provincial capital, Karachi. Chief Secretary Abdul Subhan Memon recently conducted a meeting at his office to discuss the census that is to be carried out in the province. Education and Revenue district coordination officers and executive district officers also attended the meeting among other officers.
Many decisions were made during the meeting, but no policy was put together for illegal immigrants living in the city.
According to reports of the federal and provincial governments, a large number of illegal immigrants are of Bangladeshi, Burmese and Indian origins. Nevertheless, the number of Afghan refugees has not been included because the people of Afghan origin are considered refugees instead of illegal immigrants. The federal government set up the National Aliens Registration Authority (NARA) to keep an eye on illegal immigrants in the city and register them. However, as a result of political pressure, NARA has become inactive with regard to the responsibilities that were assigned to the authority. The chief secretary failed to bring up the serious issue in the meeting while discussing the first phase of the census.
Sources in the provincial government said that a report regarding shifting of votes from other provinces to Sindh was also overlooked in the meeting. The report was submitted by National Database Registration Authority (NADRA) Chairman Ali Arshad Hakeem to the Federal Public Accounts Committee on March 19. In his report, the NADRA chairman said that 633,916 people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had shifted their votes from their province to Sindh. The report also said that 559,620 people from Punjab; 82,482 from Balochistan; 28,443 from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; and 52,259 from Kashmir have shifted their votes from their provinces to Sindh in the past seven years. However, the federal and Sindh governments have not made any decision in this regard before launching the first phase of the census in the province.
