The cabinet has finally decided about the much delayed, required and awaited census. It’s scheduled to be held in 2008. Ten years after the previous one which was held in 1998 and was a rather surface-only affair.
Hope the one in '08 is held on time and with the best possible planning and expertise. It’ll be held in a post NADRA era, that will bring new dimensions to the entire process. And hopefully the govt’s planning and implementation of policies will witness a wave of freshness and modernism suitable for the present advanced times.
What do you guys think about the whole process? How should it be done? What points should be considered while planning and carrying it out? What changes would and could be expected in the policies, SOPs and daily functioning of district, provincial and federal authorities post census?
Conducting an accurate and effective census is one thing and making changes based on the results is another issue. If you look at the census history in Pakistan the first three censuses done in 51, 61 and 72 are the one which are mostly agreed upon by the population statisticians. The rest of them were all politically tinted, and amid of that there was a criminal delay in census from 1981 to 1998. This was the period when Pakistani population jumped from 840 million to 132 million.
If you look at the 1998 results, even the provincial administrations and political parties didn’t agree with the results. It basically underrepresented some to the critical urban and rural segments of the Pakistani population.
Now on the issue of making polices and implementing the results based on census reports, successive Pakistani governments after 73 have acted against the laws which are already in the constitution. Aside from assigning NA seats, the pool of resources which should be shifted to the areas based on population are never under taken. Cities with large population like Karachi and Lahore are some of the obvious causalities but its the second tier cities like Faisalabad, Multan, Hyderabad, Gujranwala and Peshawar which have really suffered from not getting enough federal funding based on the census. The top tier cities are suffering from lack of funding but the situation in 2nd tier cities is critical. It’s been ages since the Municipal and city councils of these cities have initiated any local infrastructure or educational projects which are mostly ensured through census.
There is general perception in Pakistani urban and social studies circles that at this time the purpose of census in Pakistan is just a head count based on which some political parties try to consolidate their grip on power and nothing much, since the head count have never changed any Urban, Social or Educational infrastructure policy in Pakistan.
it'll be interesting to see what happens in karachi and Baluchistan this time around..as SB rightly pointed out there was undercounting in Sindh and Baluchistan..and the National Assembly seats have not been corrected since then..I read somewhere the general trend is for higher population growth in Sind and to an extent Baluchistan compared to the other two provinces because of migrant labour. The result should add several more seats to Sind and shift the balance of power rightly in the assemblies to Pakistans urban areas.