From Zeeshan Mirza
KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister on Wednesday in a letter to the Prime Minister has expressed the province’s reservations over the population census figures.
“Sindh have reservations over approval of the population census results in the Council of Common Interest (CCI),” Chief Minister of Sindh Murad Ali Shah’s letter to the Prime Minister read. The chief minister in his letter demanded a new population census forthwith.
“Several millions of people in Sindh have not been counted in the population census,” held in year 2017.
“Sindh’s population has been over 60 million,” the chief minister said in the letter. “In Census figures the average number of the members of a family in Sindh has been delineated five members,” the letter read.
Sindh’s chief minister also referred survey reports of the UNICEF and other international institutions with regard to the population of the province. Murad Ali Shah had submitted his reservations and evidence in written in the session of the CCI, according to the letter.
The Council of Common Interest (CCI) on Monday approved the results of 2017 national population census with majority votes and decided to hold the new census by the end of 2021. The meeting of the CCI was held here presided over by Prime Minister Imran Khan and was attended by the chief ministers of all the provinces.
Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah had voted against approval of the results of 2017 national population census, while the Chief Ministers of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan voted in favor of the approval.
Earlier, Federal Minister for Planning Asad Umar held Monday a press conference following the CCI meeting wherein he said the census results of 2017 have been approved by the council on a condition that another census will not have to wait another decade especially given the controversy the last one entailed.
The planning minister said the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) has already told the CCI there’s no way of auditing the 2017 census results so you either scrap it or accept them as is. He said we have thus decided to approve of the results because rejecting them would mean losses for smaller provinces.
Today we don’t have to conduct a census using olden ways but we can instead put to use technology as done according to the best practices around the world, the federal minister said in today’s presser. Since we have many questions raised on the way the 2017 census were carried out, we can have a more inclusive method to hammer out a strategy to conduct our next census with all stakeholders contributing their recommendations to it, he said.
Asad Umar added that soon after the approval of off CCI has been achieved, next census exercise can materialize by early 2023 which will have all reservations in the 2017 census addressed. I have lived in Karachi for most of my life and I know the objections raised to the census results are genuine, he admitted.
