For a transparent, credible census process & acceptability of census results, it is important to address concerns of all provinces, especially Sindh: Ahsan Iqbal

ISLAMABAD, Mar 15 (SABAH): “For a transparent, credible census process and acceptability of census results, it is important to address concerns of all provinces, especially Sindh” Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal Chaudhry directed Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) while chairing a meeting about 7th Population and Housing Census with Chief Minister Sindh Alongside, he requested Provincial functionary to cooperate with Pakistan Bureau of Statistics for smooth execution of Census Exercise by providing logistics and Human Resources Islamabad on Wednesday.

A virtual meeting of Minister PD & SI, Ahsan Iqbal, with CM Sindh was held at 10 am at Ministry of PD & SI.

The main purpose of meeting was to resolve the observations of Sindh Government over the ongoing Digital Census Exercise. Members from Sindh Cabinet and Senior officers from PBS, NDRA and NTC also attended the meeting. Muhammad Sarwar Gonadal, Member SSRM and Spokesperson of PBS updated the forum with the latest progress of Census activities and province wise position of important indicators. He apprised about the problem faced in field, technical support provided through Census Support Centers and NADRA teams to Field staff, Management of Census work at head office through working groups, start of Computer assisted telephonic interviews (CATI) for data validation and quality, inclusion of internal migrants due to flood 2022, mechanism of counting of aliens and assurance of completion of work at Block level through Geo tagging. The concerns raised by CM Sindh were provision of dashboards to Census District officers to validate that all the houses in a UCs are enumerated or not, verification of family members, a comprehensive mechanism to count flood affectees, an effective publicity campaign on main stream media and implementation of ring back tone with census message to aware general public.

Chief Census Commissioner, PBS, Dr. Naeem uz Zafar, along with Member SSRM/ official spokesperson, PBS, Ms. Rabia Awan DDG, other senior officers of PBS and representatives from NADRA and NTC assured that all concerns of Sindh Government will be addressed.

Access to dashboards has already been provided. Digital Census is different from conventional as former is more transparent, efficient, and effective and it also enables real time progress monitoring. Provincial government’s access to monitoring will help in reducing the trust deficit and increasing ownership. They further requested Sindh Government to cooperate for the smooth conduct of exercise. It was also requested that after resolving of highlighted issues it will become difficult to further bring any change in the running system.

“Census is an important exercise for allocation of resources and Policy making by Government. It provides basic data for implementation of development projects. Therefore, confidence building of all stake holders and their involvement from planning of census till finalization of results is important. Provinces are important stakeholders in this process, therefore, all their reservations about the process must be addressed. Further, they must be given access to dashboards till Household level by showing aggregated information. SMS gateway must be implemented for verification of Household members”, Minister PD & SI gave directions to PBS and collaborating partners.

He requested CM Sindh that cooperation from Sindh Government for provision of logistics and human resources is required to complete the enumeration process within given time frame. He shared that resolutions of issues will reduce the trust deficit of the province.