PESHAWAR, April 25: Afghan officials have launched an excercise in two areas of the provincial metropolis to locate and list their countrymen ahead of the forthcoming census, officials said.

An official of the Afghan Commissionerate, working under the ministry of state and frontier regions, said that the excercise had been undertaken in the Hayatabad and Chargano Kili areas of the city.

He said that the exercise, started on April 19, was a "pilot project", aimed at building capacity of the concerned staff and to prepare ground for the proposed census of the Afghans.

During the campaign, the Commissionerate staff would locate the scattered Afghans and would mark their houses in the target areas. The government, with the technical and financial assistance of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, is working out a plan for a countrywide counting of Afghans, both registered and unregistered. Pakistan still shelters around two million Afghans.

The proposed census, which was likely to commence in September next will cost $2 million, the official said, adding that the Commissionerate would engage staff of the Federal Population Census Organisation to carry out the exercise.

The government, he said, would evolve a new registration policy for the Afghans on the basis of the census report. A tripartite commission, comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan and the UNHCR had set a three-year timeframe in 2003 under which refugees would be facilitated to return to their homeland by 2005. The voluntary repatriation programme will be followed by screening to decide about the status of the remaining Afghans in the country.

Officials believed that the census of scattered refugees living in rural and urban areas of the country would be a hectic exercise as no authentic data about the refugees' number was available.

The UNHCR recently conducted camp profiling data of the Afghan refugees in the NWFP and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas. Officials said that the UN agency had collected extensive data about the refugees' families, their occupation, business and other particulars.

In related developments, the revenue staff is compiling data of Afghans in some parts of Fata to enable the scattered refugees to exercise their right of vote in the next presidential elections in Afghanistan.

A revenue department official in Parachinar, headquarters of the Kurram tribal region, told this correspondent that they had received directives to record data of scattered refugees, living in towns and villages. He said that the lists would be utilised during the next Afghan presidential elections.