LARKANA: The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has decided to convene a multi-party conference to discuss ‘reservations’ over ongoing digital census.

Talking to Dawn here on Tuesday, Senator Nisar Ahmed Khuhro said the conference would be held on Friday at a hotel in Karachi, also participated by the Sindh chief minister.

Mr Khuhro, who is also president of the PPP Sindh chapter, said he in that context had contacted Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan, Shah Mohammad Shah of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, Hafiz Naeemur Rehman of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Syed Sadruddin Shah of the PML-Functional, Shahi Syed of the Awami National Party and others.

He took them into confidence and invited them to attend the multi-party conference. The invitation would be extended to other political leaders as well, he said.

Meanwhile, PPP Sindh information secretary Aajiz Dhamrah approached nationalist leaders Dr Qadir Magsi, Ayaz Latif Palijo, Sanan Qureshi, Syed Jalal Mehmood Shah, Riaz Chandio, Lal Jarwar and others and invited them to the conference.

Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazal’s general secretary Sindh Rashid Mehmood Soomro was also invited to participate in the proposed conference. Writers, intellectuals and members of civil society would also be invited for consultation, he said.

He said Sindh had reservations over the issue of digital census and the presence of aliens in the province; therefore, it was decided to move forward with consensus after consultation with nationalists and other stakeholders.

Mr Khuhro pointed towards defects and flaws in the census exercise paired with the serious issue of non-working computer tablets owing to inaccessibility to the internet in remote areas and villages.

The villagers were not being provided receipts showing how many members of their family were counted and entered in the form, he said.

He feared that the digital census exercise would meet the fate not different than that of the Results Transmission system (RTS) applied in the elections.

He repeated his demand of recording the data of outsiders in a separate box in the census form with mandatory CNIC so that Pakistanis and foreigners could be differentiated.

He said thousands of dislocated flood victims should also be annexed in the census using their data in Nadra, warning that without addressing Sindh’s reservations over the issue, the census would turn out to be controversial.

Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2023