Digitising census

Pakistan’s first-ever digital census is up and running, with stakeholders hoping that the exercise helps avoid the controversial errors and omissions that allegedly occurred in previous headcounts — conducted in the year 2017. To save time, citizens can register and submit information themselves on the online platform operated by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, which is also responsible for the census itself, before the 120,000-strong army of enumerators starts going door to door around the country to collect additional details — which will also be done digitally for the first time using apps on tablets and mobile phones. Enumerators will also be monitored by geo-mapping and geotagging data by Suparco and local administration officials.

Digital data entry and collection should help significantly reduce errors and make data compilation not just easier but more cost-effective as well. This will be critical in larger cities, especially Karachi, which suffered from an astounding undercount last time around — something that led to the MQM rejecting the results of the census and continues to be a bone of contention between it and the PPP government in Sindh. The experts blamed the undercount on people being counted at their permanent addresses instead of temporary ones — such as the millions of migrant workers residing in Karachi. This wreaked havoc with the allocation of funds, as money that should have been going to megacities to finance their civic services was instead going to the villages, towns and cities where the migrant workers were registered but did not live.

Government spokespersons have also claimed that this time around the census will more accurately count homeless and transient people, which would also assist with resource allocation — and that too in a judicious manner. The old system was also blamed for making oppressed groups such as transgender people and ethnic minorities less visible by undercounting them. But while error correction should be easier under the new digitised system, we are still unsure how some oppressive forms of undercounting would be avoided — many people would ‘forget’ to provide details of daughters or differently-abled children for various reasons, none of them good. Addressing such issues requires a societal change, not a technological one.

There has also been some criticism of the census plan, mostly constructive, such as the need to spend more time counting people in megacities, but also ridiculous, such as calls to boycott the census as it is a government effort to legalise Afghan refugees or give more rights — which are constitutionally guaranteed anyway — to internal migrants. Hopefully, the fringe voices remain on the outside, and this early census is accurate enough to ensure we don’t need to hold another expensive headcount ahead of schedule.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2023.

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