The Sindh government of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has reservations about the preliminary results of the 7th Population and Housing Census conducted in the country.
This was stated by Special Assistant to Sindh Chief Minister and Senator Waqar Mehdi while talking to media persons on Saturday after attending an Iftar reception in the Shanti Nagar area of District East.He cautioned the federal authorities concerned against unduly blaming the provincial government for again conducting a flawed census campaign. Mehdi, who is also the Sindh PPP general secretary, said the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) was solely responsible for conducting the census campaign in a fair and accurate manner. He mentioned that the PPP not just raised the issue of the census in the Senate but also convened a multi-party conference on the issue to ensure that the population of Karachi and the rest of Sindh was properly counted.
He said the PBS should not unduly blame the provincial government for its failure to properly conduct a house-to-house census drive.The aide to the Sindh CM said that reservations of the concerned quarters about the census campaign should be duly resolved by the federal authorities concerned as every person living in Sindh should be duly enumerated by the census staff.
He mentioned that the PPP’s Sindh government had completed a record number of development works in Karachi and that was why the people of the city had reposed confidence in the party’s candidates in the latest local government polls.The next mayor of Karachi would belong to the PPP and would implement the vision of the party chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, to transform Karachi into a modern city with the availability of the best civic infrastructure, Mehdi said.
MQM-P’s criticism: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) convener, Dr Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, has asked why the federal government needs the MQM-P’s support if it cannot even enumerate the people of Karachi in a transparent manner. Addressing an Iftar dinner in Gulbahar, he said that bills of Karachi’s slums were collected from other tax-paying citizens of the city. He said the elite class of the country had pushed the MQM-P against the wall and the party was not being given the opportunity to talk for the survival of Pakistan. The MQM-P chief said the census results were showing that whereas, the population of Karachi had deceased, the number of people in the rural areas of Malir has increased by 22 per cent. Through this census, a war is being waged against the citizens of Sindh, he said, adding that the census had not been done in high-rise buildings of Karachi.
He opined that the current government was also of the view that the slums in Karachi had not been enumerated. The injustice to the urban areas of Sindh had been continuing for the last 72 years and undermining a nation was a global crime, he remarked.
