KARACHI, July 18: Chief Census Commissioner Khizar Hayat Khan has said that the national census-2008 will be held in October this year and all arrangements in this regard have been completed.

He was talking to newsmen during the two-day workshop for master trainers for the sixth population and housing census being held at the Federal Bureau of Statistics on Friday.

Pakistan Census Office (PCO) will organise training workshops across the country in collaboration with the United Nations Development Fund.

Mr Khan rejected reports suggesting that the census had been postponed for two years as “incorrect and baseless”, saying that enumerators would start collecting house count data in the first phase and headcount in the second. The first phase would start in October, he added. However, headcount could be delayed until March next year, if inevitable.

“This is a constitutional duty of the PCO to hold population census after every 10 years and this has to be done in time,” he stated, pointing out that a fresh census had become due now as the last one was held in 1998.

Mr Khan said that about 150,000 to 160,000 supervisors and enumerators, mostly from education and revenue departments of the respective province, would be mobilized for the census.—APP