Headcount crosses 2017 mark

One month and 19 days after the start of the seventh national census, which was the first digital census, the population of Karachi exceeded that of the sixth census conducted in 2017.

More than 16.2 million people were counted in Karachi while residents of 60,000 houses remain to be counted, officials said.

Anomalies continue to surface in the first digital census in the ever-expanding metropolitan city amid serious concerns expressed by almost all political parties of the province.

Polio vaccinators have identified as many as 5,000 buildings and houses where no enumerator from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) has paid a visit for the headcount, The Express Tribune learnt from sources on Wednesday. The polio workers have sent the lists of these houses to the district administrations.

The sources added that there have been a lot of other problems in the digital census. In some cases, the PBS enumerators would reach a street in a certain block as per the data fed into their tablet, but the software showed up "red", meaning the area was not included in that particular block. "The enumerators would leave the street uncounted," the sources added. "However, the number of streets and houses left out by the enumerators is very high."

According to the sources, availability of responsible enumerators in the houses identified by the polio workers is also a problem. "If such houses and their residents have been left out, then it means thousands of people have not been counted," the sources added.

The authorities have also disclosed the number of staff and students residing in madrassas, schools, colleges, and other educational institutions.

Interestingly, in the sixth census more than 500,000 people had been counted in the places mentioned above. But in the ongoing census, the numbers have surprisingly shrunk to a few thousand. For this reasons, the PBS has been directed to recount the population here.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2023.