KARACHI: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Senator Taj Haider has expressed concern over the digital census saying that his party’s 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.
