MQM-Pakistan rejects census results, announces protest in 72 hours

KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) leader Farooq Sattar on Sunday announced to lead a protest rally in 72 hours against the provisional census results.

Speaking in the party's general workers’ convention at PIB Colony football ground, Sattar said by understating the population of Karachi census results have done injustice to all ethnic communities living in the metropolis.

He said that Karachi's population in actual is around 30 million - whereas according to the census it is 10.6 million.

Sattar said to record its protest against the census result, MQM-P will take a rally from Mazar-e-Quaid to Statistics Division or Supreme Court's Karachi registry.

Meanwhile, Leader of the Opposition Khursheed Shah has also expressed his reservations over the provisional report of the population census and said the records of the Statistics Division and the Pakistan Army should be compared.

Shah said the facts would come to the forefront once the two census records are compared.

Pakistan's total population has been recorded at 207.774 million, according to the provisional summary results of the sixth population and housing census.

The sixth Housing and Population Census began after a period of 19 years on March 15. The census was conducted in 16 districts of Punjab, eight districts of Sindh, 14 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 15 districts of Balochistan, five districts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and five districts of Gilgit-Baltistan.