KARACHI: Senior representatives of the Sindh government will hold a meeting with the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) regarding the recent census on which the provincial government has expressed “serious concerns”, officials said on Wednesday.

A meeting of the law ministry was held at the Sindh Assembly building in which the provincial technical committee discussed various issues relating to the Sindh government’s stance on the figures of the recent census which, it said, reflected a population “which is much less than what the earlier projections predicted”.

Minister for Law and Prisons Ziaul Hasan Lanjar presided over the meeting of the technical committee formed by the Sindh government regarding the results of sixth population and housing census.

Other members of the technical committee included Naseem Ghani Sahito, director general of the Sindh Bureau of Statistics, Iftikhar Shallwani, secretary law, Ganhwar Leghari, secretary of the technical committee, and Dr Zubair Shaikh, IT consultant, who attended the meeting.

Mr Lanjar, who is chairman of the technical committee, expressed his “serious concerns” on the census results related to Sindh.

“We have been invited by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics in Islamabad on Friday,” he said, adding that they would meet the senior officials of the census division, who would brief them regarding the census figures threadbare.

“The initial results, which so far have been shared with the public, are against the predictions on the scale of any standard organisation in the world.”

He said the Sindh government had already sent a letter to the PBS in which it had demanded for the steps to address the reservations of the provincial authorities vis-à-vis census results of Sindh.

“We wrote a letter to the Bureau of Statistics in which we have asked it to address our reservations on census in Sindh,” he said.

Minister Lanjar said the results reflecting population in both urban and rural regions were not satisfactory for the government.

However, he added, “We have decided to attend the meeting in the form of a delegation to know about the authorities’ point of view regarding the population count.”

All such disputes and controversies, said the minister, should be settled through academic deliberations.

“We are ready to listen to the side on whose figures we have serious concerns with open mind. However, we have our own estimates as well.”

Officials said the technical committee would release its point of view in detail in an official handout after the meeting with the federal authorities.

Published in Dawn, September 21st, 2017