KARACHI: Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) head Syed Chief Mustafa Kamal on Friday expressed his dismay over no action or review of the initial census results that had been criticised countrywide for “inconsistencies and blatant” anomalies. He appealed to the Supreme Court of Pakistan to look into the matter as the Census 2017 exercise was conducted after the apex court orders. Mustafa said that census was an expensive and tedious exercise costing more than Rs 26 billion; hence, it was important to make it clear and fair. “Achieving desirous and transparent results of population growth rate is important to determine how great a burden would continue to be imposed on the people’s need for infrastructure, allocation of resources, including schools, hospitals, housing, roads and demand and need for food, water, electricity and jobs. He said that it is agreed in principle that a census block should range between 200-250 households; therefore, convenient to use 225 as average household per census block for rough population of our cities. “For Karachi census blocks as per PBS website are 14494 and for Lahore it is 6585”, he referred adding “using average of 225 households per census block and multiply by average urban household size of 6.2 gives an estimated population for Karachi to be around 20,219,130 and 9,186,075 for Lahore”. As per Census 2017, 2,770,074 households for Karachi and 1,757,691 for Lahore means average household per census block for Karachi stands at 191 and for Lahore is a whopping 261. “There was an issue of CNIC, illegal aliens, Internally Displaced People, internal economic migrations, inconsistencies in procedure and untrained staff some of the factors that are ignored while conducting census. Consequently, population of Karachi has been grossly undercounted to the tune of 10 million and unexplained growth of Lahore. Kamal reiterated that his party rejects the Census 2017 results and appeals to the Prime Minister, Chief Justice of Pakistan, Federal Bureau of Statistics and all concerned authorities to have an urgent review of Census 2017 by identifying discrepancies, ignored areas and neglected blocks. It is the need of time to check the validity through universally accepted procedure of Post Enumeration Survey by randomly selecting areas and cross checking its results with original census results of the same area. “Census is a national issue, therefore, PSP demands an independent commission for inquiry, overseen by a senior Supreme Court Judge, to investigate and validate the 2017 census results”, he said. Published in Daily Times, October 21st 2017.