ECP stops delimitation for LG polls in Sindh

The country’s polls supervisory body – the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) – has stopped working on delimitation for the local government (LG) elections in Sindh province due to legal hurdles, an ECP official told a parliamentary panel.

The Senate Standing Committee on Parliamentary Affairs on Wednesday discussed the delimitation process in Sindh for the upcoming LG polls.

The ECP secretary told the committee, chaired by a lawmaker from Sindh Sussui Pilajo, that the government had not yet officially notified the results of the population census that was held in 2017.

“Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on September 3 informed the ECP that the matter is still pending at the Council of Common Interests (CCI),” he said.

The secretary said the ECP had written letters to the prime minister, the National Assembly speaker and the Senate chairman to get this issue resolved.

He told the committee that Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) provinces had done legislation to allow the start of the delimitation process on the basis of provisional census results.

“However, Sindh has not undertaken any such legislation. Therefore, the ECP has stopped the work on delimitation in the province. It will issue a new schedule in this regard later,” he said.

The committee later passed a unanimous resolution urging the government to fulfill the parliament’s promise to rectify errors in the Census 2017 results. The panel also instructed the relevant departments to brief it on the legal hurdles to the delimitation process in its next meeting.

The population census 2017 was a detailed enumeration of the country's population which began on March 15 , 2017 and ended on May 25, 2017. The census was conducted by the PBS after a gap of19 years. Initial estimates put the population of the country at 220 million.

The provisional results were finally presented to the CCI on August 25, 2017, and then approved and released to the public.

Both the PPP which has its vote-bank primarily in rural Sindh and the MQM which is regarded as representative of the urban Sindh had rejected the census results.

PPP leader Khursheed Shah had issued a statement demanding that the data collected by the PBS should be compared to the data from the Pakistan Army, which was involved in the census process.