KARACHI, Oct 13: The country's first Pakistan Social and Living Standard (PSLS) survey covering 77,000 households in all the 106 districts is in full swing, and enumeration and data collection is expected to be completed by the end of February next year.

Officials say the findings of this survey will help the government draw up an action plan for the Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan (PRSP) of the government. The survey seeks information on education, demographic complexion, income, employment, water supply and sanitation, and on allied maters that will tell a lot about the key social indicators.

According to the officials, a workforce of 500 enumerators and statisticians were engaged in collecting information and data from a comprehensive questionnaire from about 33,000 households in Punjab, 19,200 in Sindh, 11,800 in NWFP, 7,800 in Balochistan, 2,300 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, 1,700 in Northern areas and 1,100 in FATA.

The data collection from FATA remains doubtful because of the battle-like conditions and also the families living in the traditional Pashtoon belt are not ready to share information on their families and their social and economic status.

The information gathering and data collection is expected to be completed by the end of February 2005, after which statisticians, social scientists and economists will start deriving results which the officials believe will be over by the end of May.

"The findings of this gigantic survey will constitute the core part of the budget speech next June likely to be delivered by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in his capacity as finance minister," an official said.

Also going along with this survey is a household consumption survey from a 16,000-household sub-sample of the large sample of 77,000 households. This survey focuses entirely on the poverty and will be done on quick approach methodology. This will continue till the end of June next year.

Sources say that never before in Pakistan's history a demographic survey on such a large scale was ever carried out. "In 2000, an integrated household income expenditure survey covered 14,000 households.

But its findings were suppressed by the government on the grounds that a wrong methodology was adopted and it magnified poverty situation in Pakistan beyond proportions. The findings of this survey were never known to the people.

Another quick survey of 5,000 households done in April this year revealed a fall of four per cent in poverty-affected population in Pakistan. But it was immediately challenged and questioned by the economists and social scientists. Shaukat Aziz as Finance Minister used findings of this survey in his budget speech.