Afghan refugees counted as common citizens: Bajwa

Chief Census Commissioner Asif Bajwa Monday said the country's population over the past two decades has witnessed rapid growth due to various reasons. Addressing a press conference here, he said that urban population was divided in different blocks and rural population was divided in different mozas. In 1998, Afghan refugees were counted as living in camps, he said, adding that these refugees after getting proof of residence (PoR) cards got themselves incorporated with the local population after 2005; therefore, Afghan refugees have been counted as common citizens of Pakistan.
He said that the provinces were requested to send their teams for inspection of data compilation process and technical teams of three provinces including Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh have visited Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) so far, while team from Balochistan has not arrived yet. He said Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab expressed no reservations over the census process, while Sindh has some objections to it which would be addressed amicably.
He further said that the assistant commissioners in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh were appointed as census commissioner for the census. He said that all field operations were conducted by employees of provincial governments and after collection of data they dispatched the same to the PBS, which is responsible to compile it. He said that using the provisional population data for upcoming elections was possible only after the change in the Constitution. The matter was referred to Inter-Provincial Co-ordination Committee (IPCC) which would send its recommendations to the Council of Common Interests (CCI).
He said that it was not in the purview of PBS to declare any area urban or rural as it was the authority of the provincial government, and the bureau only follows the boundaries as notified by the provincial governments. Moreover, he said that the local government department and director Military Lands (DML) were the authorized departments to declare what areas were urban and what were rural. Bajwa said even during the field work, five international teams visited different areas and expressed satisfaction over the process of data collection by the census staff.
He said that all Lahore district was notified as urban in 2015 and even two union councils of Kasur were included in it; therefore, the population was recorded at 11.10 million.
In case of Karachi, he said that the provincial government included just 7 mozas in the urban areas and the boundaries drawn in 1998 were still valid for the city. He said that even in 1998, a variation of 1.5 percent was witnessed between provisional and final figures which were in accordance with international standards, adding that there might be some variation between provisional and final figures of census, which was a routine matter.