KARACHI: The Sindh chief minister’s census complaint cell established at the CM secretariat said on Friday it had received 390 complaints over the past 15 days — from March 16 to March 31 — and they were duly shared with the authorities concerned.

The CM’s census complaint cell’s figure is far lesser than what the provincial census commissioner had shared with the press a day earlier, according to which some 567 complaints had been received from Karachi alone.

Officials in the Sindh government, however, claimed that there was no ‘discrepancy’ vis-a-vis the two figures as the census authorities were directly receiving complaints from selected Sindh districts where the first half of the first phase had officially been completed on Thursday.

“Our facility for the people of Sindh was to complement the overall mechanism of the census authorities,” said a senior official in the Sindh government, adding that those complaints had been added to the overall census figures, which had duly been shared with the media the other day.

According to the details collected from the CM’s complaint cell, it received 390 complaints over the past 15 days — from March 16 to 30 — and 62 of them came from Karachi South, 42 from Karachi Central, 106 from Karachi East, 37 from Karachi West, 63 from Malir, and 23 from Korangi.

Similarly, the chief minister’s cell received 42 complaints from Hyderabad, four from Jamshoro and 11 from Ghotki district.

Majority of the complaints pertained to the citizens’ concerns about census teams not reaching their homes, said a government spokesperson.

“Complainants said their houses had not been counted. People also expressed concern over certain teams’ counting of just ground floors in some neighbourhoods while leaving the upper floors uncounted,” said an official.

He said filling the column of mother tongue without consulting families about their mother tongues; counting family members less than their actual numerical strength; bringing defective maps of villages in which village names were missing, etc, were other complaints.

A government spokesman said the complaints were brought to the knowledge of the chief minister and on his instructions they had been sent to the authorities concerned for necessary action.

Census authorities said there was a total ban on use of pencil or photocopied form for census and wherever such complaints were made, severe action had been taken against those involved. Similarly there was also a total ban on the census staff to ask irrelevant questions not written in the form.

The first half of the census process of phase I has been completed in eight districts and one taluka of Sindh.

The officials said if anyone was found giving wrong information, one could be fined Rs50,000 or given six months’ sentence, or both.

Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2017