HYDERABAD: Pakistan Peoples Party Senator Taj Hyder, who is also a member of the party’s core committee, has said that while it was always anticipated that Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) would undercount the population of Sindh, it was the enormity of the undercount that was really shocking.

As a result, he said, the fresh census had become much more controversial than the census of 2017, adding that similar complaints of undercount were coming forth from Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In a statement issued on Monday, he said that the calculation of Sindh’s population was fairly simple. He shared that there were 43,838 population blocks in Sindh according to PBS data, and that 250 households were mandatory in each block. However, on ground 500 to 800 households per block were common. “We will still be on a very low side if we take a figure of 300 households per block in calculation. Multiplying this figure with the number of blocks gives us the total number of households in Sindh as 13,151,400,” he said.

Unicef conducts a Multi Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) in 128 countries every four years jointly with federal and provincial governments, according to him. The latest MICS in Sindh conducted jointly by Unicef and federal and Sindh bureaus of statistics, officially put average family size in Sindh at 6.5, he said, and added that multiplying this figure with the number of households in Sindh shows the population of Sindh as 85,484,100.

He said that Sindh had, therefore, been undercounted by a good 30 million persons. Calling the census a failure, he explained that not having a single demographer from Sindh in the census advisory group while preparing working paper, insistence on anti-Sindh de-jure method of counting in working paper, ultra-long questionnaire with irrelevant questions, untrained crowds of enumerators, most of whom had never used a tablet, and unending time given for selective count adjustment were some of the factors which guaranteed the failure of this exercise even before it started.

For the past 17 months, he said, “we have been knocking our heads against the wall of PBS and federal government. In so many communications and meetings, Chief Minister Sindh has been cautioning them against repeating old mistakes”.

He shared that in a meeting held at the CM House on August 1, 2022, he (Taj) directly questioned the foul intent in the background of what they had already done. But ‘sweet talkers’ did what they had planned on day one, he said.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2023