Unveiling the roadmap for the 7th digital population and housing census, Minister for Planning, Devel-opment and Special Initiatives Asad Umar Tuesday said the final results of the 7th digital population and housing census would be announced by De-cember 2022 and the new elections would be based on the fresh census results.
He said that in May-June this year, the government would conduct a pilot test of the census to test the whole process for risk management and disaster recovery, and for successful conduct of digital cen-sus.
In September-December, he said the main field work would be held while in November post sam-pling enumeration would be done.
Talking to media here before inaugurating National Census Coordination Center (N3C) at the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), Asad Umar said for first time in history, the government was going to hold digital census by utilizing latest technology to save time and ensure transparency and data accuracy.
He said during current year’s budget, an amount of Rs5 billion was allocated for the census while the remaining budget would be allocated in the upcom-ing fiscal year.
The minister added that around Rs10 billion would be spent on the procurement of software and hard-ware for conducing digital census.
Chief Statistician PBS, Dr Naeem Zafar briefing on the planning, and operation of the upcoming digital census, said the N3C setup would be headed by the Deputy Chairman Planning Commission with pro-vincial/regional representatives and law enforce-ment agencies.
He said the Census Support Centers were being established in all 614 tehsils of the country to con-duct first ever digital census smoothly and to avoid complications.
The dedicated support centers at tehsil levels would ensure 24/7 availability of system and the end-user and field enumerator support. The census support centers would be equipped with online monitoring dashboards and would also act as control room and complaint inquiry office.
Briefing on the roadmap for the 7th population and housing census, the Chief Statistician said the exer-cise of appointment of staff would be held in March 2022 while training of field staff for pilot project would be done from April 15, 2022 to April 30, 2022.
Similarly the pilot census (2000 blocks approxi-mately), would be held from May 15 to June 15 while enumeration work (first step-self enumera-tion) would be done from July 15 to Jul 30 2022.
