ISLAMABAD: The government on Sunday vehemently rejected international objections to the involvement of the armed forces in the sixth housing and population census that is currently under way across the country.

“They should apply their standards in their [own] countries. We have to work in the light of our circumstances,” Finance Minister Ishaq Dar said on the completion of the first phase of the national exercise.

He was reacting to criticism from United Nations agencies for involving the armed forces in the census exercise, who dubbed it against international standards and best practices. The minister said that such objections from international observers were not valid in the context of Pakistan.

The housing census would not have been scrapped unanimously by the Council of Common Interests (CCI) in 2011 had it been possible to carry out the process without the armed forces, he said.

Dar says ECP will have provisional results in two months if it wants to demarcate new constituencies

“The government had to postpone the census in 2016 due to the non-availability of army personnel, even though civilian authorities were fully prepared. It was not possible for the army to spare so many people because of their engagement on the borders and in Operation Zarb-i-Azb,” he said.

The minister said that census staff, including military personnel, were being welcomed by the people with tea and cold drinks wherever they went in all four provinces, adding that “nobody was objecting to the process and its transparency because of the ‘ideal partnership’ between civil and military authorities”.

He termed the involvement of the armed forces crucial to ensuring the credibility, integrity and authenticity of the process.

The finance minister criticised Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah for raising questions over the transparency of the census process. “It is the easiest thing to raise questions [but] decisions cannot be made on someone’s whim; we have to follow the law,” he said.

Mr Dar said that the Sindh chief minister had written to him and that his concerns had been addressed in a reply, which explained the requirements of the law passed by the PPP government.

The chief minister had been advised to consult Farooq H. Naek, who was PPP’s law minister at the time and current counsel, the minister said. Mr Shah was also advised to sit with Mr Naek and Khawaja Zaheer, the PM’s special assistant, to iron out issues.

Mr Dar denied having received a purported second letter from the Sindh chief minister, saying he didn’t know where Mr Shah was getting his population figures from.

He also declined to say whether the demarcation of constituencies for the upcoming elections would be based on the results of the census, saying that the issue fell within the jurisdiction of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). He, however, said that provisional results of the census would be compiled in two months and then made public, giving the ECP enough time to fulfil its responsibility.

The finance minister was flanked by Chief Census Commissioner Asif Bajwa, who paid tribute to members of a census team who lost their lives in a suicide attack in Lahore. Four soldiers and three passers-by were killed and 19 others injured in that incident.

One enumerator was killed in a road accident in Mansehra, while two others were kidnapped in Kech district of Balochistan, he said.

Mr Dar said that the son of the deceased enumerator had been absorbed in the education department and his widow was given Rs1 million as a token of sympathy. “All those who lost their lives while on census duty are martyrs, because they were performing a national duty,” he said.

Mr Bajwa said the national exercise was being carried out at a total cost of Rs18.5 billion. Of this, Rs6bn would be spent on civil and armed personnel and the remaining Rs6.5bn on hiring vehicles.

He said the first phase, which began on March 15 and involved 63 administrative districts across the country, had been completed successfully. Phase 1 involved the enumeration of these districts into 80,702 blocks and 188 census districts.

He said 200,000 army personnel had been deployed — 44,000 for enumeration work and the remaining for security of the field staff. In addition, six teams of international observers, led by the United Nations Population Fund, were conducting independent and unbiased monitoring of the census process.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017