Federal Minister for Planning Development & Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal on Wednesday directed to constitute a committee to devise a mechanism and to look into the matter of undercounting in big cities and suggest a way forward to resolve the issue to assure a transparent and credible census field operation.
The committee will include Secretary Planning Syed Zafar Ali Shah, Provincial Chief Secretaries, and Chief Census Commissioner Dr Naeem uz Zafar.
The minister gave these directions while chairing a meeting to review progress over the ongoing exercise of census field operation. The meeting was attended by the Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunication Syed Amin Ul Haque, Chief Census Commissioner Dr Naeem uz Zafar, Secretary Planning Commission Syed Zafar Ali Shah, National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) Chairman, NTC Managing Director, and other stakeholders.
The planning minister further directed holding a meeting of the Census Monitoring Committee to discuss further deliberation in order to meet the deadline. During the meeting, the minister also directed SPARCO to conduct geo-tagging to identify the count of missing slums.
Earlier, Chief Census Commissioner briefly explained the achieved targets, highlighted the problematic areas, and explained that PBS has appointed monitoring teams to find gaps in low-coverage areas to investigate the real issue.
He claimed that a major cause of low coverage is under-reporting by the field enumerators. He requested provincial functionaries to be more vigilant to resolve this administrative issue.
