• After massive outcry and federal govt’s intervention, Karachi population crosses 2017 mark
• PBS officials are visiting areas and buildings left out during initial days of digital census

KARACHI: In order to address concerns of political parties and ‘fix problems’ in the digital census, the federal government has deputed teams of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistic (PBS) to what officials described as a combing operation to ‘assist’ and in some cases ‘lead’ the enumeration process being conducted in Karachi by officials of the Sindh government, it has emerged.

With the process of counting people resumed on Wednesday after Eid holidays, sources said that the federal government’s intervention has showed that there were ‘flaws’ in the census process.

They said that the PBS teams visited several areas in the metropolis and found that many of the 32,000 high-rise buildings had been left ‘uncounted’ in the process because district administrations’ enumerators had never visited those buildings.

The sources said that it was because of the visit of PBS officers to several left out areas and high-rise buildings, the city population has crossed 16.7 million — Karachi’s population in the 2017 census was 16.05m.

“The PBS teams are targeting high-rise structures which were left uncounted. They are also focusing those buildings where not ‘all’ the people living in the building were enumerated by the district teams,” they said.

“The teams comprising PBS officials from Karachi and Islamabad were deputed in the city in last week of Ramazan due to reports that people living in several high-rise buildings which housed hundreds of thousands of individuals were not enumerated,” said an official, adding: “The complaints were made by different political parties as well. So it has been decided to constitute PBS teams and attach them with the field enumerators.”

However, the officials denied the ‘impression’ that the enumerators had missed all 32,000 high-rise buildings, claiming that there had been ‘several’ facilities identified as ‘completely uncounted’ or ‘counted incompletely’.

“When re-evaluated by PBS teams, it has emerged that in several cases the enumerators didn’t bother to visit these buildings at all to count the people living there and just marked them as ‘enumerated’,” said the official.

“In some cases, they faced different challenges and to avoid them they relied on ‘conjectures’ and ‘heresy’, which also affected the accuracy of the data and total count of the population,” he said, adding: “During last few days of Ramazan, the PBS teams conducted a combing operation in several such buildings. The teams are likely to stay until the job is completed.”

Growing criticism

The PBS move came amid growing criticism on the process of digital census mainly in Karachi and widespread reservations about the process by almost all political parties in Sindh.

However, the parties campaigning for presenting a ‘true’ population count of Karachi in the census still sound cautious about the effectiveness of the process and are not sure about the final outcome of the city population numbers.

“The population of Karachi is not less than 35 million,” said Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan convener Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqi. “It’s a documented fact supported by different standards and reports. It was the MQM-P which pushed the authorities to go for another census after serious flaws in the 2017 count. So if the numbers of urban areas are manipulated again in the final count, it will be unacceptable for Karachiites.”

Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman, Karachi chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, demanding for count of each and every person living in Karachi, has already announced a “power show” against the “flawed census” on April 30 on Sharea Faisal. He reiterated his party’s demand for formation of a committee comprising stakeholders of the city to oversee the census.

“Now the authorities themselves admit that number of buildings remain uncounted which pushed the PBS to intervene and depute its teams, our concerns have proved to be true,” he said. “It’s just one flaw which was addressed to some extent, but deputing Islamabad teams won’t help.”

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2023