KARACHI: The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) is learnt to have accepted a request by the Sindh government to extend the timeline of the ongoing Digital Housing and Population Census to address the province’s concerns over the exercise.

Informed sources told Dawn on Wednesday that a PBS team, led by its chief statistician, held a two-hour meeting with Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah at the CM House and assured the provincial government that a proposal to extend the census timeline would be laid before a monitoring committee, headed by Federal Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal.

The PBS officials told the Sindh government once the proposal to extend the census timeline was approved by the monitoring committee, it would be sent to the Council of Common Interests for approval.

The sources said the chief minister apprised the PBS team of certain issues and anomalies in the process of data gathering, especially through tablets which, according to him, were not working properly due to connectivity problems.

The PBS meeting with the Sindh CM was held on the federal planning minister’s instructions during a meeting of the census monitoring committee after the Pakistan Peoples Party expressed concern over the ongoing census and threatened to part ways with the PDM-led coalition government at the centre.

Mapping flaws

According to the sources, the Sindh chief minister told the PBS team that many people in the province were told that they had not been registered in their blocks due to flaws in mapping.

Provincial ministers Sharjeel Inam Memon, Saeed Ghani, Syed Nasir Hussain Shah and Jam Khan Shoro also attended the meeting.

The PBS team was shown videos of Umerkot, Thar district, in which the census staffers were telling people their names did not appear in the block.

The sources said the CM complained that adequate time was not given for the country’s first digital census.

Mr Shah cited the example of Egypt, where the first digital census took a year to complete.

The PBS officials told the chief minister that the CCI would take up the issue of extension at its next meeting, asking Mr Shah to seek more time for the census.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Senator Nisar Ahmed Khoro, the Sindh PPP chief, told Dawn that the federal government had not intimated him about the PBS team’s meeting with the provincial government.

Published in Dawn, March 9th, 2023