The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) suggested re-checking the enumeration in around 30,000 buildings of more than four storeys in Karachi and sent the list of those buildings to the Sindh government. The PBS monitoring team identified approximately 40,000 buildings throughout the country where they feared that some households might not have been counted, and about 30,000 of them belonged to Karachi. The PBS chief statistician, Dr Naeemuz Zafar, physically showed a few of these buildings to the provincial census commissioner in Karachi and asked the relevant assistant commissioners to revisit them for the census count.
As of Sunday, April 9, the PBS’s command & control room in Karachi reported that 13.76 million people had been counted in Karachi during the census, and 2.7 million out of 2.93 million households had been enumerated. The PBS had also geo-tagged around 40 million households in the entire country. Independent researcher Sadya Siddiqui estimated that Karachi’s population was increasing by 0.5 million annually, half of which was attributed to migration to the city, based on urban planner Arif Hasan’s estimate in a special newspaper supplement on Vision Sindh 2022 published in April last year. Siddiqui predicted that the official census 2017 count for Karachi could be extrapolated to a final count of 18.5 million to 19 million people in the city in 2023. According to a book authored by Hasan and Mansoor Raza in 2021, there were over 200,000 under-construction apartments in the city.
PBS officials said that 92 per cent of the city had been enumerated, and they were hopeful that the population count in Karachi would increase from the 2017 census count. However, the PBS dashboard showed that only 77.5 per cent of the city had been enumerated, leaving the remaining 22.5 per cent of the city, primarily comprising the densely populated District East, with four million heads to be enumerated.
Muhammad Sarwar Gondal, the PBS coordinator and spokesperson, shared on Sunday that action would be taken against assistant commissioners who showed negligence in the census operations, and a report mentioning their negligence would be included in their service record. The assistant commissioners were in charge of the census operations in all the sub-divisions outside cantonment areas. The PBS had demarcated 37 different census districts in Karachi, comprising sub-divisions and cantonment boards, and their respective assistant commissioners and CEOs were made in charge of census operations there.
The PBS would extend the census process for a few more days to complete the count on the request of the provincial government. Gondal said the assistant commissioners had been told to get the leftover blocks and buildings enumerated as soon as possible. He explained that District East and District Malir were the two districts of Karachi where a significant number of people had still not been counted as the enumeration started a bit late in those districts.
The PBS would submit final results of the census to the federal government by April 30 so that the Election Commission of Pakistan could start the delimitation process for the elections. Elections would be held on the basis of the last approved census results, and unless the census results had been approved, they could not be used for delimitations. The Federal Minister for Information Technology Aminul Haque of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan had also been made part of the census monitoring committee on the recommendation of the prime minister, addressing political parties’ reservations on the census.
