Census — complete and incomplete at the same time

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s sixth housing and population census has been completed; however vital social indicators such as employment rates, internal migration trend, and mortality and fertility rates have yet to be collected.

The data collection exercise, which started in March, has just been completed but the process seems incomplete due to lack of information of other social indicators.

Though the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) claims to have gathered information relating to the total population and housing but it has failed to take into account members of different religions or those who speak different languages.

Only five religions and nine languages were made part of the census process, according to PBS officials.

The problem of not counting all religions and languages stemmed form the lack of space for it in the census forms. It was revealed that this became a problem as PBS did not want to reprint the forms that were originally printed in 2009.

Pakistan’s first population census in 19 years to begin from Wednesday

Services of 84,000 enumerators to be utilised in collecting data from 168,120 census blocks across country

Moreover, the forms are also said to be financed by an international organisation as PBS has no printing facility. These forms were transported from the UK after a London-based printing company was tasked to ensure safe delivery of the 43.5 million census forms to Islamabad.

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar also failed to disclose this fact when he had announced a budget of Rs18 billion for the enumeration exercise.

The PBS officials also remained tight lipped in the courts — hearing various objections to the exercise — about their already compromised position. They told the courts that since census has already been initiated, it would not be wise to amend these forms in the middle of the exercise.

On the other hand, a proposal was also submitted to include more questions in the surveys pertaining to the performance of certain institutions.

According to Census Committee Member Habibullah Khattak, a proposal has been submitted to incorporate more questions in the survey forms.

The Supreme Court had already suggested that a question on ‘access to justice’ should also be made part of the survey form. The apex court wants to gauge the trust people have in the judicial system of the country.

There are also proposals to amend form 2A. The question related to persons with disabilities has already been incorporated in form 2A on the directions of the apex court. The crucial data of these persons will be released with summary results, officials said.

Census: (Dis)counting others

Rights activists are concerned the census exercise is deliberately leaving out some non-Muslim communities

According to Chief Census Commissioner Asif Bajwa, the decision to separate form 2A from the census process was because armed forces personnel were available for a limited time to assist the PBS teams.

He added that it will be easier to conduct surveys for other information once key information regarding country’s population is available.

Bajwa also remarked that conducting other surveys will not take that long and the detailed results of the census will take a year to be compiled.

Processing data

The PBS is currently processing data, and issuing the summary result of the lengthy exercise is the first priority of the bureau.

The country’s population with gender segregation will be part of the initial results, which will be revealed within 60 days.

The data of each district will be compiled first, then the population of all the provinces and the country will be determined.

Bajwa had hinted that census staff counted nearly 200 million people and they have knocked on at least 35 million doors during this exercise. These projections were confirmed by the recently released Economic Survey 2016-17.