Second phase of population census to start in September

The Population Census Organisation (PCO) of the Statistics Division will start the second phase of 6th National Population and House Census after Ramazan (in September) all across the country. Director General of Population Census Organisation Muhammad Akram Janjua told APP on Wednesday that the PCO has already completed the Housing Census 2011 operation.
The organisation is conducting training workshops for the field staff to launch the second phase of the census and as many as 175,000 field staff would be trained after Ramazan, he added. He said that the PCO was organising sensitisation workshops across the country to create awareness about the importance of population census and its importance in future planing for socio-economic progress of the country.
The first workshop of the series was held in Peshawar where the District Administrations including Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners and other officials were provided basic education and training, he added. Akram said that the sensitisation workshops would also be held in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan, Karachi and Quetta, and added that in the first meeting members of provincial assemblies were briefed about the field operation.
In the second phase, he said, topics to be covered in census include demographic and social characteristics, literacy status, geographical or migration characteristics, economic characteristics and fertility or mortality (females 15-49 Years). The housing characteristics include information about living quarters; number of rooms, gender of the owner, tenure status, period since constructed and construction material used in outer walls and roofs.
It also includes data on source of drinking water, source of lighting and cooking fuel used, availability of proper kitchen, bathroom, latrine and type of latrine, media of information such as TV, radio, newspaper, telephone and mobile phone to access the living standards of the people in the country. The DG PCO said that the Population Census Organisation of the Statistics Division has launched 6th Population and Housing Census 2011 operations on April 5 to 19.
During the house listing exercise, the authorised enumerators visited from door to door, marked the house number with green mark and registered the computerised national identity card (CNIC) of the head of the House. It may also be mentioned here that PCO had established 145,844 census blocks all across the country to conduct the Population and Housing Census 2011 from April 5 this year. Three types of questionnaires were used: Form-1 for House Listing; Form-2 for main census operation; and Form-2A to be used on sample basis for detailed questions.