Seats' reallocation, fresh delimitation: passage of constitutional amendment bill likely on Monday

The Senate is expected to pass a crucial constitutional amendment bill seeking reallocation of seats of the national and provincial assemblies and fresh delimitation of constituencies on the basis of provisional census results during the upcoming session summoned for December 11.
The bill was expected to be passed during the last session, but it could not sail through after major opposition party, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), refused to support the bill, saying unless its reservations on preliminary census results are addressed, it will not support the bill.
The PPP has reservations about the census results and the government has agreed to raise census blocks from one percent to five percent for third party audit - a key demand of the PPP to support the bill in Senate where it enjoys majority.
A senior PPP leader who wished not to be named said though the Prime Minister had agreed in Council of Common Interests (CCI) meeting that a third party audit of the 5 percent census block will be undertaken, the PPP wants surety for this.
"We don't want the military to be involved in this exercise again, and the government's decision to involve chartered accountants in the third audit is not acceptable to us. We want this exercise [audit] to be done by statisticians," he added.
The sources said that Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Leader of the House in Senate, Raja Zafarul Haq has been given special task to woo the opposition members to get the constitutional amendment done from the Upper House of Parliament during this session.
Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) - the top government body which undertook the census - rejected the senators' concerns regarding alleged irregularities in census 2017. However, the PPP is not satisfied with the briefing given to its senators by chief census commissioner. The chief census commissioner had rejected the allegations that the census results had been manipulated and that the population of Karachi had been deliberately understated.
He said the entire population of Karachi and Lahore was counted as per the record of computerized national identity cards and voter lists available with the authorities. He maintained that the census had been carried out in a transparent manner and that the data obtained had already been verified with statistics recorded by the army during the counting process.
Senator Taj Haider, however, questioned the census results, saying that he had obtained population data of Karachi in 2013 from National Database and Registration Authority and the population of the city at that time was more than 25.6 million but the record has been tampered during the recent census.