QUETTA: Pakistanis now have seven more days to self-register online as part of the country’s first-ever digital census, as the government on Friday extended the deadline after requests from various quarters that the time allotted for the exercise was too short.

The self-enumeration process began on Feb 20 and was supposed to end at 12am Saturday.

“On the explicit recommendation of the provinces, the date for self-enumeration at self.pbs.gov.pk has been initially extended for seven days,” the spokesperson for the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics said in a statement on Friday.

The optional self-registration is followed from March 1 by a month-long collection of details by more than 120,000 enumerators using tablets and mobiles, which organisers say will make the process more accurate, transparent and credible.

The digital count will also provide data for policy decisions, which are now based on the 2017 census that cou­nted the population at 207 mil­lion people. It is also exp­ected to avoid controversies that beset the 2021 census, which was done manually and its results were never announced over complaints about errors and exclusion.

Deadline for online registration moved forward by a week

As for the ongoing census, the objections mainly came from the coalition government’s ally Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan, which said earlier this week that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had decided to extend the deadline for self-enumeration.

Other parties have also expressed concerns.

On Friday, the central secretary general of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal also described the census arrangements as insufficient and demanded the government extend the deadline for 10 days to count the households and for two months to count individuals.

Speaking at a press conference in Quetta, Waja Jahanzeb Baloch said the party would stage a protest on March 6 on the issue.

He said the census had started in Balochistan, like the whole country, but the arrangements were insufficient. “We have not seen the [census] staff in two days,” he lamented.

He said only 1,310 blocks had been marked in Quetta, which had a population of three million, and only 100 vehicles had been provided to the staff.

He said the census was meant for counting people and it was not necessary to conduct the census within three days.

So the deadline should be extended.

He said only 24 supervisors and some 120 enumerators have been assigned to Gwadar district and it was impossible for them to cover 700 kilometres in such a short period.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2023