A long-overdue census

The national census, the physical counting of how many people live in a country and where they have their primary abode is an essential planning tool for any government anywhere in the world. The US held its first census in 1790 and the UK in 1801, and the UK has held one every 10 years ever since with the exception of the 1941 census where the Second World War provided an interruption. Pakistan is a young country and does not have the longevity of the UK or the US but it has something of a patchy record when it comes to counting itself. The population is rapidly expanding and highly mobile, with large numbers moving from the countryside to the cities over the last 30 years. The last full census was in 1998, and an attempt to carry out a census in 2011 by the Zardari Administration was abandoned as ‘political difficulties’ arose.

Now a new date has been announced and Pakistan is to make another attempt to count itself in March 2016, and the results are going to have a profound outcome across the political, social and economic life of the country. It will determine the proportion of federal resources allocated to the provinces as well as the allocation of legislative power in the National Assembly. Alongside the human count, there is to be a census of housing held simultaneously — essential as the country has a long-term and chronic housing shortage. The armed forces are again to assist with the census and the preliminary results will be announced in June 2016, with a final analysis of the figures by December 2017. We warmly welcome this announcement and hope that the census does indeed go ahead. To say that the census is going to be politically sensitive understates the matter by several orders of magnitude. In the large cities in particular, the demographic has shifted radically, and different populations have a diversity of political affiliations. The entire exercise is going to cost Rs14.5 billion, and considering the importance of the exercise is going to be money well spent — and another brick in the democratic wall.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st,  2015.

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