ISLAMABAD: To address concerns over the exercise of digital census, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) after a detailed briefing to ministers, lawmakers and leaders of political parties on Friday decided in principle to extend digital census for another 15 days.

PBS spokesperson Sarwar Gondal told Dawn the digital census, previously scheduled to conclude on April 30, would be extended till May 15. To work out an operation plan during the extended days, he said, the bureau would hold a meeting with chief secretaries on Saturday (today).

“We will present the request of the political parties in a meeting of census monitoring committee,” he added.

Need for the extension was felt after it emerged during the exercise that Karachi and Lahore populations showed little increase since the 2017 census.

PBS asks political parties to identify areas not covered by enumeration teams

The PBS at the briefing requested political parties to identify the areas that had not been covered by census teams.

Mr Sarwar said the bureau would need another 15 days to finalise data before submitting it to the Council of Common Interests (CCI) by June.

An official announcement issued after the meeting showed that 237.448 million individuals had been counted in all the four provinces, an increase of 29.768 million since 2017 when the tally was 207.68m.

So far, 54.138m people have been counted in Sindh, 116.442m in Punjab, 39.315m in KP and 19.713m in Balochistan.

Meanwhile, a joint meeting of Balochistan lawmakers and representatives of political parties from Quetta discussed the process of census in Quetta and its preliminary results.

The participants demanded that the census be conducted again in the provincial capital and the exercise should be extended for two months.

They said that census results had shown that Balochistan’s population had increased by more than seven million while that of Quetta had decreased by 500,000, which they claimed was part of a plan.

Saleem Shahid in Quetta also contributed to this report

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2023