PM Urged Extend Close Date For Census: CSJ

News Desk

Lahore: The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has urged Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif to extend the closing date of the census to ensure everyone is counted in the process and to avoid the consequences of previous censuses.

The CSJ Executive Director Peter Jacob said, “The date must be extended to review and ensure that the issues are addressed immediately and build trust in the process and the final results.”

The CSJ has been involved in observing the census process for the past month with volunteers across Pakistan.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) had announced to close the census on April 4, 2023 but many areas have not been counted. PBS giving an open call or advertisement for identification of missed areas will not be helpful; the district administration must be mobilised to ensure that all blocks are covered, stated Jacob.

Earlier, the CSJ, through a letter, raised concerns with PBS regarding the ongoing census. CSJ’s observed that the ongoing process displayed weak preparation, insufficient staff, and training of field enumerators. The enumerators missed out on questions about persons with disabilities, religious identity, mother tongue, and transgender while also collecting the data on unauthorised paper forms, which meant that data entries on these tablets could be assumptions, and hence the output might fail to show the true picture of demography.

Issues faced in geo-tagging, data entry, and retrieval of the unique token number with regards to self-registration, the questionnaire does not cater to the Kashmiri language among the options for languages spoken in Pakistan.

The communication emphasised that the government has made a huge investment of time and resources, and that besides political parties, the minority communities have expressed reservations about the ongoing census and suspect that the results may not show a true reflection of their demography.