The federal government will not further extend the digital census date beyond May 15, 2023.

Sources in the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) said that the department will not further extend the date of the census as it has already extended the date four times to ensure complete coverage and full enumeration.

PBS has listened to the concerns of political parties, especially in Karachi and has tried to address their concerns, sources added. PBS has identified some anomalies, especially in the big cities which included negligence of field enumerators towards their work, and insufficient deployment of security personnel for field staff.

However sources said that PBS had communicated to provincial governments to take strict notice of any misreporting by enumerators, provision of one -one security to enumerators, and strict monitoring of field enumeration by respective ACs and DCs.

Sources said that PBS, with the help of a digital system, identified and shared with provincial governments a list of blocks having multistory buildings with less coverage, a list of blocks having negative population growth, and other relevant information. PBS also deputed additional officers/officials from PBS headquarters for the facilitation of provincial governments in this regard.

Due to these initiatives and joint efforts made by the PBS team as well as the government of Sindh an increase of 8.2 million persons was registered in the already completed blocks, sources added.

In addition to the above, PBS also identified and shared another list of blocks identifying the potential under coverage with the provincial governments for rectification through targeted and coordinated combing operations to ensure complete coverage. Due to this initiative, it added another 4.6 million persons to the already completed blocks.

Sources said that this digital census has some additional features like geo-tagging of all structures and buildings used for residential and economic activities and collection of data of economic activities as per international classification to utilize it as a framework to conduct much awaited economic census in the country in addition to demographic and housing characteristics data.

The additional features of the census will provide the basis for evidence-based policy, planning, and decision-making to ensure good governance as well as to determine diversity, expansion, and sharing of various economic activities in our economy which is pivotal to ensure the prosperity of the nation.

So far 120,007,936 individuals have been counted in Punjab, 56,149,769 in Sindh, 39,596,664 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 20,634,606 in Balochistan and 2,270,436 in Islamabad Capital Territory till May 11.

Source: Pro Pakistani