PPP rejects federal cabinet decision on 2017 census

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan people’s Party (PPP) on Wednesday rejected the Cabinet decision of the federal government regarding the Census 2017, saying that it was unfortunate that the Federal Cabinet had opted to bypass the agreement of the parliamentary leaders of the Senate for correcting the highly controversial Census 2017 results through recount of population in 5% randomly selected population blocks.

“Agreement of the parliamentary leaders, which also bears the signatures of Senator Azam Swati on behalf of PTI, had made possible the passage of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows use of the provisional Census 2017 figures for delimitation of constituencies only for the general elections of 2017 and the by-elections thereof,” said member Core Committee of the PPP Taj Haider in a statement on Wednesday.

Taj Haider said that the above figures are not valid for any other election at any level or for the distribution of resources between the provinces. He said the deliberately created flaw in the method, used for Census 2017, is its count on de jure method, which does not count migrants from other provinces in the population of the province, where they were presently living.

He said this mistaken method was not applied, while counting the population of Islamabad, where more than 90% of citizens are migrants from other provinces. However, he said this major flaw in counting methodology had greatly reduced the population of all districts of the province of Sindh.

He said the agreement of parliamentary leaders is based on recount of all persons living on any address in randomly selected blocks all over Pakistan, which is the universally accepted and implemented de-facto method.

He said average household size had been greatly reduced in Census 2017 in all districts of Sindh and this decrease was much higher in comparison in districts other than those of Karachi.

“Unfortunately MQM was speaking only about Karachi districts and GDA, another coalition partner of the selected government, had supported this gross injustice with the province of Sindh,” he said.

Taj Haider referred to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), which is conducted in every province of Pakistan under the auspices of UNICEF every 4 years. MICS for Sindh 2014 on page ix gives the average household size in Sindh as 7.2. “If we multiply this figure with number of households of Sindh recorded in Census 2017 (8,585,610) the minimum population of Sindh in 2017 comes to 61,816,392 instead of 47,886,051 indicated in the anti-Sindh Census 2017,” he said.