Headcount of 40m population completed

PBS chief statistician says NADRA, NTC playing important role in securing data

ISLAMABAD:

Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) chief statistician Dr Naeemuz Zafar said on Thursday that counting of 40 million people in 8 million houses was completed, so far, during the ongoing seventh national census.

Talking to the media along with census spokesperson Sarwar Gondal, the PBS chief statistician said that the citizenship of the Kashmiri people was ‘Pakistani’, adding that the Sindh government lacked confidence in the process.

He said that March 31 had been set as the deadline to complete the census.

For the planning purposes, the country had been divided into 185,509 blocks, while listing of 167,578 blocks had been completed so far, out of a total of 183,048 blocks.

“The listing could not be started in 2,664 blocks, so far. There are security issues in 201 blocks,” Zafar told reporters, while adding that “listing could not be done due to security issues in former Fata [Federally-Administered Tribal Areas].”

Also read: Digital census faces ‘obstacles’

It is pertinent to note that the counting of people started on March 12.

In the first phase, house listings and all buildings have been geo-tagged and so far, 40 million buildings have been geo-tagged across the country.

Responding to a question, Dr Naeemuz Zafar said that work on this digital census had been going on for the last two years, adding that 121,000 people were trained for the census exercise.

“It is a digital household and economic census. NADRA and the NTC are playing an important role in securing the census data, which will help in the economic planning in the country,” he added.

Responding to another question, Dr Naeemuz Zafar said that there had been attacks on two census teams in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, while the Sindh government lacked confidence in the process, while adding that “the Sindh government can monitor our entire work.”