WORLD NEWS | Pakistan: Jamaat-e-Islami to protest underreporting of Karachi population in census

Islamabad [Pakistan]April 1 (ANI): Jamaat-e-Islami has announced that a protest will be held outside the Karachi governor’s residence against a “conspiracy” to underreport the city’s population in the upcoming census, Pakistan Today reported.

The party’s Karachi chairman, Hafiz Naeem ur-Rehman, and the party’s other leader, Idara Noor-e-Haq, expressed concern about the census process. They demanded that everyone living in Karachi should be counted as a resident of the city.

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According to the Pakistan Today report, Karachi should have representation in the provincial and national assemblies based on its actual population, the Jamaat leader said.

He slammed the ruling Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) government for not playing its due role in the actual counting of Karachi’s population.

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According to news reports, the Jamaat leader slammed the double standards of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) when it came to rights in Karachi.

Hafiz Naeem ur-Rehman said the BJP was afraid of reaching a consensus in Karachi because it would result in a chief minister from a big city and would shake the feudal system that provided the basis for the BJP’s rule in the interior of the province, Pakistan Today reported.

He called for transparency in the consensus process and for a mechanism to check people registration and statistics at the blockcode level.

Earlier, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan’s Rabita (MQM-P) Coordinating Committee expressed serious concern over Pakistan’s ongoing first digital census and said that if any errors were found in the statistics, the party would hold its own census. Census, Express Tribune reports.

The party further claimed that, according to news reports, its reservations about the country’s ongoing seventh population and housing census were being fulfilled. In February, the party had written to the chairman of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), saying that allocating three days to conduct the census in densely populated Karachi was not enough.

The letter states that at least 10 days should be allowed for household counts. It added that the number of days for the three phases of the national household and digital census should be increased.

The party also warned that any population below 40 million in Karachi would not be accepted, the Tribune reported. Sources said the MQM-P had communicated its reservations on the census to the prime minister and the chief commissioner of the exercise, the chairman of PBS, the Express Tribune reported.

As of Sunday, censuses of 23.6 million homes had been completed nationwide, according to the latest PBS data. It added that it had completed counting 140 million people. Overall, 61 percent of the census has been completed, according to news reports, PBS said. It went on to say that the entire exercise in the country will be completed by the scheduled April 4 date. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)