KATHMANDU, MAY 3
The government has decided to postpone the 12th National Population Census-2021 indefinitely due to the surge in coronavirus cases.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology informed that the Cabinet decided to postpone the pre-scheduled date for the census from June 8 to June 22.
National census is conducted in every 10 years in Nepal.
Meanwhile, the Central Bureau of Statistics has also not been able to conduct trainings for enumerators due to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases across the country. The CBS was conducting trainings for around 9,000 supervising staffers to conduct the census in all 77 districts. "We have stopped the training considering the increasing coronavirus cases," Tirtha Raj Chaulagain, spokesperson for CBS, said.
Chaulagain further said that conducting the census in the scheduled time was very unlikely due to frequent changes in the dateline of trainings.
CBS had recently started trainings across the country.
The CBS is yet to provide training to around 43,000 enumerators, who will actually work in the field to gather data for the census. All the 52,000 staffers will be mobilised in all local levels to conduct the census. After collecting data from the field, the enumerators will take additional two months time to provide a preliminary report. After that, it will provide formal data in eight months to the government.
A version of this article appears in the print on May 4, 2021, of The Himalayan Times.
