Amongst many qualms of our recent history, the digital census, unanimously approved in the Council of Common Interests (CCI) meeting presided over by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, perhaps is amongst the very few silver linings we are having today.
With this, now Pakistan is the first country in South Asia that has gone through this digital exercise. Despite being a challenging g job, the concerned authorities have done great.
In a politically divided society it is more than satisfying that n the meeting of the Council of Common Interests held at the Prime Minister’s House, the four provincial chief ministers, federal ministers, and officials of other relevant departments including the Statistics Institute participated.
South Asia’s first self-enumeration portal was used by 6.6 million families in Pakistan, which shows their confidence in the system. This confidence and experience may pave the way to go digital in other fields as well.
This census improved Pakistan’s profile around the world using modern technology.
Through this phase, we are also moving forward towards digitalizing our institutions as the National Census Coordination Center and Provincial Census Coordination Centers equipped with a modern system of centralized decision-making and effective coordination among stakeholders were established.
This process was accomplished by seamlessly connecting 121,000 IT-trained data collectors to a central database through tablets and specific operating systems.
40 million buildings were geotagged on multi-featured satellite maps that were more comprehensive than Google Maps.
The data of about 5 million people and a total of more than 250 million people were seamlessly linked to the central centers daily during the census.
2 million calls are handled by 24-hour call centers with 150 agents for handling complaints and resolving issues.
Computer-assisted telephonic interviewing method was used during the census process for data quality assurance and coverage analysis.
37 working groups were formed on census software, management of tablets, and security call centers to provide an effective support system for field staff.
495 support centers were established across Pakistan at the tehsil level for the distribution, repair, and maintenance of tablets and data attachment which also served as grievance redressal centers for the public and census staff.
In the next phase, a data delivery portal will also be developed for policymakers and academia to improve relevant decision-making and research.
A baseline will be prepared for all development and non-development projects and the impact of each project will be evaluated.
Hopefully, in the next few months, the fruits of the digital census will begin to emerge.
An accurate population count is a must in shaping the contours of National policy and this digital census is a milestone in this regard.
