Cabinet's decision regarding Census 2017 'unfortunate': PPP

• PPP rejects federal cabinet decision on 2017 census
• PPP's Taj Haider calls cabinet's decision to bypass an agreement on census between parliamentary leaders "unfortunate"
• Explains how the counting method used is flawed 

ISLAMABAD: The PPP has a problem with the Cabinet's decision to bypass an agreement with the parliamentary leaders of the Senate to correct the highly controversial census 2017 results through a recount of the population in 5% randomly selected population blocks.

It called the cabinet's decision "unfortunate".

PPP's Taj Haider, who is a member of the party's core committee, issued a statement over the matter on Wednesday.

He said an agreement between parliamentary leaders, which also has the signatures of Senator Azam Swati on behalf of PTI, had made it possible to pass the 24th Amendment to the Constitution.

This amendment, he said, allowed the use of figures from the provisional Census 2017 for delimitation of constituencies only for the general elections of 2018 and the by-elections.

Read the good, the bad and the unusual of Census 2017

These figures, he said, are not usable for other elections or for the distribution of resources between the provinces.

He said the deliberately created flaw in the method, used for Census 2017, is its count on de jure method, which does not count migrants from other provinces in the population of the province they were presently living in.

He said this mistaken method was not applied while counting the population of Islamabad where more than 90% of citizens are migrants from other provinces.

The same method had greatly reduced the population of all districts of Sindh.

Haider pointed out that the agreement of parliamentary leaders was based on a recount of all persons living on any address in randomly selected blocks all over Pakistan, which is the universally accepted and implemented de-facto method.

Read Census 2017: 10 questions on Pakistan's population

An average household size was reduced in the Census 2017 in all districts of Sindh and this decrease is much higher in comparison in districts other than those of Karachi.

Cabinet approves 2017 census after three years

The federal cabinet authorised on Wednesday the submission of the Sixth Population and Housing Census 2017 report for the final approval of the Council of Common Interests.

The cabinet discussed the next census, and the ministers said that the Constitution allows the government to hold it whenever it deems fit. They said that the National Database & Registration Authority should have a central role in the census. A new committee was formed to hold further discussions related to the matter.

The MQM-P informed the PTI government its reservations about the census results and asked it to hold a new census. It had expressed its objections about the alleged faulty counting in Karachi and other cities in Sindh during the census.