ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has rejected the federal cabinet’s decision to validate the provisional census results without an audit in randomly selected blocks to remove “massive lacunae in the controversial” headcount exercise three years ago.

Taj Haider, a member of the PPP’s core committee, said in a statement on Wednesday it was unfortunate that the federal cabinet had opted to bypass an agreement between leaders of parliamentary parties in the Senate for correcting “the highly controversial” results of the 2017 Census through a recount of population in five per cent randomly selected blocks.

Mr Haider said the agreement, which he claimed carried the signatures of Senator Azam Swati on behalf of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, had made possible the passage of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment allowed use of the provisional census figures for delimitation of constituencies for the general election of 2018 only and subsequent by-elections.

He said these figures were not valid for any other election at any level or for the allocation of resources to provinces.

“The deliberately created flaw in the method used for 2017 census is its count on de jure method, which does not count migrants from other provinces in the population of the province where they are presently living.

“This mistaken method was not applied while counting the population of Islamabad, where more than 90 per cent of citizens are migrants from other provinces,” he said.

Mr Haider said the major flaw in the counting method had led to an underreporting of the population of all districts in Sindh. The agreement between parliamentary leaders envisaged a recount of all persons living on any address in randomly selected blocks across the country.

Household size

The PPP leader said the census had underreported the size of an average household in all districts of Sindh. The difference was lower in Karachi than other districts, but “unfortunately the MQM is talking only about Karachi and the Grand Democratic Alliance, another partner of the ‘selected government’, has supported this injustice to Sindh”.

Mr Haider referred to a study, known as Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), which is conducted in every province by the Unicef every four years.

According to the 2014 MICS for Sindh, the average size of a household in Sindh is 7.2. “If we multiply this figure by the number of households in Sindh recorded in the 2017 Census (8,585,610 or 8.5 million), the minimum population of Sindh comes to 61,816,392 (61.8m) instead of 47,886,051 (47.8m) indicated in the anti-Sindh Census.”

The “manipulated reduction” of 13,930,341 (13.9m) in the population of Sindh amounts to a reduction of 22.54 per cent in the actual population of Sindh, the PPP leader observed.

“Sindh has suffered too long... We Sindhis are not prepared to take this lying down any more,” Mr Haider said.

Published in Dawn, December 24th, 2020