KATHMANDU, NOVEMBER 9

The 12th series of National Population Census is scheduled to be conducted for 15 days from June 8 to 22 in 2021 and as per the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the upcoming census will collect more descriptive details as well as additional details than the previous census.

During the video conference jointly organised by CBS and Society of Economic Journalists Nepal (SEJON), Nebin Lal Shrestha, director general of CBS, said that the upcoming census will collect the detailed description of the households such as ownership, its uses and structure.

Similarly, the description related to land used for agricultural purpose and its area, number of animals and birds, number of households constructed with the grant provided by the government and number of people who have taken vocational training and skilled manpower, among others, will also be included.

“Access to financial facilities (account and loan in banks and financial institutions) is an addition to the questionnaire this time,” said Shrestha.

Description of facilities used by households such as drinking water, toilet, cooking fuel, electricity, television, phone, vehicles, etcetera will also be collected during the census.

Similarly, the census will collect the details of property in the name of women, small family businesses, absentees in family due to labour migration and details of their work/profession.

Shrestha mentioned that the census will also collect data about working status, institutional area, reasons for not working and job search.

He also said that data will also be collected at the ward level to verify the statistics collected from the household level, among others. CBS has prepared a questionnaire of 80 questions for 2021 census.

CBS has projected that there are around seven million households and the population stands at 30 million in the country at the moment.

With the slogan ‘My Census, My Participation, National Population Census 2021’ CBS expects participation and support from everyone in the upcoming census. To reach every populace and make 2021 census successful, CBS will be forming eight different coordination committees encompassing different tiers of government from the central to ward level and also technical and thematic committees. The 2021 census will be the first to be conducted under federal Nepal. Around 43,000 enumerators and 9,000 supervising staff will be mobilised to collect data.

“Earlier, teachers used to be taken as enumerators but this time people from local levels will be given opportunities to be enumerators. They will be invited through open advertising,” Shrestha informed.

As per Shrestha, master trainers will be trained from mid-January and they will later train the enumerators.

Stating that pilot census was conducted during the time of COVID 19 crisis adopting health safety protocols, Shrestha said that 2021 census also will be done in the same way.

Meanwhile, Junarbabu Basnet, chief reporter at Gorkhapatra Daily, said that accurate statistics of the census are important for disseminating right information from the media so that the public can make right decisions based on right statistics and the government can draft right policies, plans and programmes.

Similarly, Bhim Gautam, president of SEJON, said there is a need for training for economic journalists on how to read, analyse, present and simplify statistics to help public understand the statistics.

Meanwhile, Suman Aryal, joint secretary of the National Planning Commission, highlighted the importance of transparency and stakeholder participation during census for the quality of the statistics that are collected.