‘Only Sindh has objections over Census’
ISLAMABAD: Chief Census Commissioner Asif Bajwa said on Monday that a high-powered Governing Council has been supervising compilation of the census data in order to ensure the credibility of the sixth Population and Housing Census.
“Qualified and professional demographers are the members of the governing council team,” Bajwa said while addressing a press conference along with top officials of Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) here.
He said that the provinces were requested to send their teams for inspection of data compilation process and so far technical teams of three provinces including Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh visited PBS while the team from Balochistan has not arrived so far.
He said that the Punjab Technical Team has also paid the second visit to the Bureau and expressed satisfaction over the process. Bajwa said even during the field work, five international teams visited different areas and had expressed satisfaction over the process of data collection by the census staff.
He said three provinces including Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have no reservations about the census process while Sindh has some objections which would be removed. He said that there might be some variation between provisional and final figures of the census, which was a routine matter.
He said that even in 1998, a variation of 1.5 per cent was witnessed between provisional and final figures, which was according to international standards. Bajwa, once again clarified that declaration of urban or rural areas was done by the provincial authorities and PBS followed the boundaries as notified by the provincial governments.
He said that Local Government Department and Director Military Lands were authorised departments to declare what areas were urban and what rural. In case of Lahore, he said that all Lahore district was notified as urban in 2015 and even two union councils of Qasoor were included in it, hence the population was recorded at 11,100,000.
In the case of Karachi, he said that just 7 Mozas were included in urban areas and the boundaries drawn in 1998 were still valid for the city. The chief census commissioner also clarified that Afghan refugees were living in refugee camps during 1998 census while after 2005 they were provided Proof of Residence (PoR) Cards and were allowed to live in villages and can travel anywhere in Pakistan, which resulted in upward trends in population.
He said that all the field operations were conducted by the employees of provincial governments and after collection of data they dispatched the same to PBS which is responsible to compile it. He said that for using the provisional population data for upcoming elections was possible only after the change in the constitution. The matter was referred to Inter-Provincial Coordination Committee (IPCC) which would send its recommendations to Council of Common Interests (CCI).
Bajwa said that compared to 2.38 per cent disabled population registered in the census of 1998, there were just one million disabled registered during Census 2017.
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