Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Senator Taj Haider has expressed concern over the digital census saying that his partys central election cell has received disturbing reports about the undercount of the population from sources located in different provinces.
He said that Initial computations in the province of Sindh reveal that the damage done to the province of Sindh as a result of the so-called ‘Digital Census’ is far bigger than what was initially feared and warned against when we now look at the population figures published in the Gazette notification of August 7, 2023, a communique said here on Tuesday. Sindh, which remains the destination of economic migrants from other provinces, Gilgit Baltistan, and Azad Kashmir, besides a large number of illegal migrants, has been allotted an average family size (AFS) of a mere 5.64. Punjab has an average family size of 6.43, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 6.94, and Baluchistan 6.42.
He noted that the reduction of just one person in average family size results in a reduction of 18 to 20 % in the total population of Sindh. He further said there were only four districts in Sindh, two of them urban in Karachi where the average family size is above six where rest of it in rural Sindh have less than that. All districts in Punjab (except Lodhran AFS 5.95) have an average family size well above 6. The lowest family size in Sindh is in Badin 4.89 and Dadu 5.11 both PPP strongholds. Ghotki has an average family size of 5.35. Adjacent Rahim Yar Khan District in Punjab has an average family size of 6.72. Senator Taj Haider said the reports were alarming received from the provinces of Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that even when no enumeration had been carried out in remote and sensitive areas of both provinces the notified population figures of various districts were significantly less than the ones that had been readily available in the digital census.
In Sindh where such data was mostly available the figures of houses and residents in many districts obtained in the much trumpeted digital census count had been arbitrarily reduced by almost 10 percent in the notified census figures. One fails to understand any kind of logic behind this move except forced rigging. The reduction in average family size has also been reinforced by a drastic reduction in the number of population blocks which in Sindh are only 43,838. Official figures of the population of each block have not been made public.
According to Law, the number of families per block has to range between 250 to 300. Dividing block populations obtained from other sources by Sindh’s average family size of 6.5 given in Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) conducted by UNICEF one finds hundreds of blocks where the number of families per block is 800 to 1000. There are some blocks where the number of families touches 2,500. If we just multiply the reduced number of population blocks (43,838) with the MICS average family size figure of 6.5 and the least figure of 300 families per population block the minimum population of Sindh by simplest calculation works out to be 85, 484, 100, he maintained.
