Afghan refugees’ presence may delay census in Balochistan

ISLAMABAD: The schedule of sixth population census in Balochistan may be affected in the wake of a considerable political opposition to it mainly due to the presence of a large number of Afghan refugees in the province.

A key ally of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has publicly rejected the census saying that it would be futile unless the Afghan refugees living in Balochistan are evacuated from the province.

Federal Minister for Ports & Shipping and President of National Party (NP) Mir Hasil Bizenjo has been quoted as saying that the situation can be marred if census was conducted in the presence of Afghan refugees.

“The positive results of the ongoing efforts to improve the state of affairs in Balochistan can produce negative consequences. First a mini census of Afghan refugees be carried out and they should be confined to camps. Only then, there can be room for national census in Balochistan.”

The first part of the two-phase census will start from March 15, 2017 under the supervision of armed forces in selected areas of Pakistan. However, the entire Balochistan comprising six divisions of Quetta, Zhob, Sibi, Naseerabad, Kalat and Makran will be covered in the first phase. As many as 1,064, 649, 579, 540, 1,690 and 429 enumerators will be deployed respectively.

The opposition to the collection of data relating to population by Bizenjo and other nationalist parties of Balochistan apart, the government has conclusively decided to hold the process on the order of the Supreme Court, which pushed it hard not to further delay the process. The government has to give a firm commitment to the top court to hold the exercise.

An official said that the government would make maximum efforts so that the Afghan refugees in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) were not listed in the census. The problem arises where these Afghans have got identity cards of Pakistan.

A total of 45,000 armed forces personnel would be deputed along with the enumerators. The federal government has asked the provinces to identify sensitive areas which would be handed over to the armed forces for conducting the census.

Census will be held on traditional method using paper-based questionnaires starting as per the field operation plan given by Statistics Division.

The inordinate delay in census has caused several difficulties a principal being the absence of accurate data of population and housing all over Pakistan to determine different facts. There may be increase in seats of the National Assembly from any province in the wake of the census.

There have always been massive complaints about manipulation in the census by the vested interests and political parties in certain areas. In the past, according to official documents, the results demonstrated a trend of over enumeration in the areas of Sindh and Balochistan while Punjab reflected under enumeration. This impacted on the population proportion of all the provinces compared with 1998 census. The Sindh’s share in population increased by 6 pc and that of Balochistan went up by 2 pc while share of Punjab reduced by 8 pc. This was going to have serious political implications as the intense fights among provinces regarding allocation of parliament seats and distribution of resources was to be affected.

Documents said that those results were statistically analyzed. The population increase in percent and their “confidence limits” were computed on 1988 census to identify province-wise and district-wise over and under estimation. It confirmed over enumeration in Sindh and Balochistan and under enumeration in Punjab. In view of glaring abnormalities, the then Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, had scrapped the exercise altogether, never to be held again.

Importantly, a similar trend had been witnessed in Sindh and Balochistan during the housing listing operation in 1990. The areas of abnormal increase in population were rechecked through special surveys conducted by the Rangers as well as other staff. Huge discrepancies and over reporting in population were reported. As a consequence, the 1991 census was postponed to be conducted later in 1998 under the supervision of the army.

There was no need to avail the services of the Pakistan army, police or other law enforcement forces if the government had abandoned the nineteenth century archaic method to conduct the census. Then, it has to opt for technology-based mechanism in this high-tech era.

In the present mode, the census is carried out manually by the enumerators, the low paid government servants, who are easily swayed into writing down in the specific pro-forma the details like number of people living in a certain house provided to them by the politically motivated inhabitants. The census personnel don’t bother or are not allowed by powerful elements to do physical verification of the members of the families, which resultantly inflates the number, fudging the exercise.