Body formed to resolve disputes on digital census

ISLAMABAD: The government has constituted a high-powered committee to resolve disputes on the first-ever digital census in major urban centres, especially in Karachi and other parts of the country.

An official announcement made by the government here on Wednesday stated that Federal Minister for Planning Development & Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal on Wednesday directed constituting the committee consisting of Secretary Planning, Syed Zafar Ali Shah, provincial chief secretaries and Chief Census Commissioner, Dr Naeemuz Zafar, to devise a mechanism and look into the matter of undercount in big cities and suggest a way forward to resolve the issue to assure a transparent and credible census field operation. The minister made these directions while chairing a meeting via zoom to review progress over the ongoing exercise of census field operation.

The meeting was attended by Chief Minister Sindh Murad Ali Shah, Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Aminul Haque, Chief Census Commissioner, Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), Dr Naeemuz Zafar, Secretary Planning Commission Zafar Ali Shah, the chairman National Database and Registration Authority, the managing director NTC, SPARCO and other stakeholders.

The minister directed the Census Monitoring Committee to hold further discussions to meet the deadline. He directed the SPARCO to conduct geo-tagging to count missing slums.

Earlier, the chief census commissioner explained the achieved targets, highlighted problematic areas, i.e. under coverage in big cities, high-rises and slums and explained that the PBS had appointed monitoring teams to find gaps in low coverage areas to investigate the real issue. He claimed that a major cause of low coverage was under reporting by field enumerators. Dashboards have been provided to all concerns and this claim can be easily verified. He requested provincial functionaries to be more vigilant to resolve this administrative issue.