KARACHI: MQM-P Senior Deputy Convenor Dr Farooq Sattar said on Thursday that there had been complaints from the East district that census workers had been told not to include children below five years of age in the headcount.
He also expressed concern that ‘system malfunction’ that marred the start of the exercise while addressing a press conference along with members of the coordination committee at the party’s temporary headquarters in Bahadurabad.
“People should be able to see census results on a website or portal,” he said.
Sattar said that MQM-P was the only party running an awareness campaign on the digital census.
He repeated his party’s reservations on Karachi’s population count, claiming that various studies “commissioned by corps commanders, leaders of political parties and institutions have estimated the population of Karachi at more than 30 million”.
He said the current exercise aimed to exclude 10 million residents in order to deprive the city of its share of national resources.
Meanwhile, MQM-P’s Rauf Siddiqui said that the time set aside for counting houses during the census wasn’t enough.
The census exercise schedule has three days allocated for counting housing units.
For the remainder of March, census workers would go doorto- door for headcount.
