ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Planning Asad Umar held Monday a press conference following the Council of Common Interests (CCI) meeting wherein he said the census results of 2017 have been approved by the council on a condition that another census will not have to wait another decade especially given the controversy the last one entailed, ARY News reported.
The planning minister said the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) has already told the CCI there’s no way of auditing the 2017 census results so you either scrap it or accept them as is. He said we have thus decided to approve of the results because rejecting them would mean losses for smaller provinces.
Today we don’t have to conduct a census using olden ways but we can instead put to use technology as done according to the best practices around the world, the federal minister said in today’s presser.
READ: Pakistan to get 15m doses of vaccine, FM announces after meeting with German counterpart
Since we have many questions raised on the way the 2017 census were carried out, we can have a more inclusive method to hammer out a strategy to conduct our next census with all stakeholders contributing their recommendations to it, he said.
Asad Umar added that soon after the approval of off CCI has been achieved, next census exercise can materialize by early 2023 which will have all reservations in the 2017 census addressed.
I have lived in Karachi for most of my life and I know the objections raised to the census results are genuine, he admitted.
However, he added that if we scrap the 2017 results, it means we recoil to the 1998 results and consequently, the distribution of resources and wealth would be done to provinces on the basis of stats then. He said it would be quite disadvantageous to all the provinces.
In the voting today for census results as moot for CCI huddle today, all federal parties, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab voted in favor of the census results while Sindh voted against it.
Leave a Comment