Senate committee proposes rechecking of census results

ISLAMABAD: Senate's Standing Committee for Statistics and Privatisation on Tuesday proposed rechecking of one percent blocks of the Housing and Population Census 2017.

Statistics Minister Kamran Michael said the results of the census match with the data collected by the armed forces, 

Statistics Advisor Asif Bajwa, in a briefing to the Senate Standing Committee for Statistics, said that the Council of Common Interests (CCI) decided to conduct the census exercise in 2015.

"Karachi's total population is 16 million, of which 14.9 million people reside in urban areas," Senator Mohsin Aziz said. "The entire population of Lahore was classified as the urban population by the Punjab government."

When asked how data collection activities were undertaken in Waziristan during an ongoing army operation, Bajwa responded that census blocks were already present so the process was duly conducted.

"National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has issued 13 million identity cards but the institution doesn't have data for nearly 70 million residents," Bajwa said. "NADRA's database was used for the census."

As per international institutions, NADRA's data is not worthy of being shared.

"CCI didn't object to the census process," he said. "Why are political parties now rejecting the collected statistics." 

The Sindh government had earlier announced that it would reject the provisional results of the sixth population census.

Terming the results as a conspiracy against the province by the federal government, senior PPP leader Nisar Khuhro said the PPP government will not let the province be treated in an unfair manner.

The provisional government 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.

The federal government rejected the reservations raised by the Sindh's political parties and said the process of conducting the census was transparent.

It added that all provinces had monitoring committees which were briefed on a regular basis while the census was being conducted.

The government further said that additional time was given to address all reservations and complaints.

Results released for the citywide population in the provisional census conducted by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics show that Karachi’s population has ballooned to 14.9 million people in 2017 as compared to 9.39 million in 1998.

Thirty-three per cent of Sindh’s 47.9 million-strong population lives in the province’s two major cities, Karachi and Hyderabad.

While the provincial capital’s population grew by 59pc in nineteen years, Hyderabad’s population only grew by 0.6 million during the same time.

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.