Consensus is a must for the census. This exercise is useless unless there is no consensus among political stakeholders and federating units as resources are distributed on the basis of this exercise.

These are the words of Tariq Malik, who heads the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra). He was the guest of Shaukat Piracha on his show Rubaroo on Saturday to speak on the digital census, grievances, and the system.

Nadra—a body that issues legal identification cards and keeps the record of citizens—has been the talk of the town since the beginning of the digital census in Pakistan. This time the country has shifted from manual to digital to ensure transparency.

The exercise comes as the country is gearing up for the elections, which still hang in the balance due to security and financial issues. Every political party has demanded a “fair counting of people” in order to ensure the registration of their voters. This, according to them, is the key to recognising their vote bank that the claim lies in the specified areas.

The PPP, MQM, and PTI and the list go on of the parties that have expressed reservation over the last census.

Nadra chief Malik lauded the Pakistan Census Bureau for shifting from manual to digitise. He explained that the bureau had faced two problems during the 2017 census: a lack of consensus among political stakeholders and the difference between the ground realities and the sum total of people in an area.

The organisation took two steps to address this issue, he said. Firstly, they linked the CNIC—Malik preferred to call it the legal ID as there are alien registrations, afghan cards, proof of registration cards, refugee cards, and foreigners cards—with documents. He also suggested an answer “none” for those who don’t have the card so that the remaining people could be registered.

Secondly, he added that the organisation was doing geo-location tagging of the houses. This exercise ensures that the person lives in the specified area “like if the person is residing in an area for around six months and intended to be there so they should be considered there where they are found.”

When asked about the never-ending grievances of political parties, Malik blamed a lack of expertise in running a public awareness campaign. He suggested that all institutions should have run a “robust public awareness campaign”. They had discussions with the political parties, however, the people still had reservations, he added.

He said that a team went to meet Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah when the PPP raised objections. “They were resolved,” Malik said and stressed the need for engaging political parties rather than working in a haste.

As many as 126,000 people with tablets are going door to door for the census. According to Malik, in this way, they have fewer chances of mistakes.

When asked about the reservation held by people in Karachi over counting the people, he said that such a practice was not being followed right now.

“If there are 50 apartments in a building then they will be counted as 50 separate units. Pakistan bureau of the census has learned and corrected its processes,” he said.

‘There is nothing like a 100% foolproof thing’

Under the current census, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics also launched self-register online with an aim to ensure transparency. It has a certain span of time of two weeks. Malik rebuffed an impression that Nadra should be the authority to keep an eye out on newborn babies and life events.

“You should report to Nadra. So you have to be a responsible citizen. You have to register yourself and tell your life event or else call us we will send Nadra van,” Malik said. He added that there would be nothing like a 100% foolproof thing in digitisation and digitalisation.

The Nadra chief substantiated his argument by saying that there are grievances while sharing his experience of organising the census in Zambia before coming to Pakistan. A grievance redressal system is made to address people’s grievances after the end of the exercise, he said and praised the bureau for doing it while the counting of people is under way.

This is Tariq’s second stint as the Nadra chief. In his last tenure in 2008, he arrived here from the United States as an election observer and worked with the-then chief election commission late Justice (retd) Fakhruddin G Ibrahim.

His observations concluded that there were many shortcomings in electoral rolls/lists, which means they were not a “true reflection” of the electorate. To some extent, he managed to resolve it with the former ECP chief. They found that 37 million entries – out of the total 80 million – were suspicious because of duplicates, exclusion and inclusion errors.

Malik explained that if a person is dead and still is mentioned in the list is an exclusion error. The inclusion error appeared when Afghans were registered in the voter lists.

These errors, according to him, were corrected by a voter list underpinning “one person, one identity, one vote”. Later, Nadra assisted the Election Commission of Pakistan through the Computerized Electoral Rolls System (CERS)—a database for the addition, deletion and correction of voters electronically.

This system, which was approved in Parliament, helped the ECP in issuing the voter details in respective districts.

“We are a service provider, just because we have people’s registration data so we share that with them [ECP] then they give us the voter list to print it and deliver it to the constituencies,” he said.

Cleansing of fake CNICs, passports

“In the last year, we did not serve as many as 1,427 people, who came here having an Afghan card. The registration of Afghan citizens started in former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s tenure when it was manual. Since they made cards in 2008 we had multi-biometric system which uniquely identified them. We did an exercise in which we found around 150,000 suspicious Afghan cards till 2017. We did the analysis. We gave notices and the remaining cards are now 92,000. These cards are blocked.”

Check and balance

Malik explained the process of how they trace the authenticity of a card. Here are the steps:

• We check the family tree to check the relationship
• We have added such checks that we have made a separate database for Afghan refugees with the help of UNHCR. So transaction and border crossing data also comes from there
• Documentation as we have got many repositories from various databases.
• The devices on borders—Chaman, Torkham, Angoor Ada—that keep the data of people coming from the neighbouring country

Cleansing of database

He added that last year as many as 50 million Afghans were verified and notices have been issued to around 24,000 people under the process. Their case is being resolved.

“Our database is better than the world. Our system has 0.001 per cent less margin error,” he said.