11th national census begins Friday

KATHMANDU, June 17: The most important part of the eleventh national census, the 11 days long counting of the country´s population, is all set to kick off Friday.

The commencement of Census-2011 will be formally announced on Friday morning with the filling out of a questionnaire for President Dr Ram Baran Yadav´s family, said Bikash Bishta, deputy director general of the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). A group of top CBS officials headed by National Planning Commission (NPC) Vice-chairman Dr Dinesh Chandra Devkota is scheduled to reach the president´s official residence, Maharajgunj, to collect the details of the country´s first family.


After starting with the first family, the team headed by Devkota will collect details about the families of Vice-president Parmananda Jha and Prime Minister Jhalanath Khanal. “On the first day of the census, district census officers will personally meet local political party leaders and collect their family details,” Bishta said. “All enumerators, thereafter, will go to the field.”

The CBS has mobilized 34,000 enumerators and 8,500 supervisors to carry out the biggest ever exercise for counting the country´s population. As it is poised to take place against the backdrop of a myriad of social changes caused by the decade long conflict, the outcome of the new census is being seen with much excitement. With its most comprehensive questionnaire in place, the new census is expected to reveal a lot of intriguing facts and figures.

The CBS has projected Nepal´s population to reach 28.5 million by 2011. With reports on household listings, conducted between May 15 and June 1, trickling in from all districts, the CBS has noticed interesting migration patterns in the composition of the country´s population. Dr Rudra Suwal, CBS director, says some Tarai districts, like Jhapa and Kailali, appear more populous than projected on the basis of the previous census reports.

“The volumes of census materials that we delivered to census supervisors in different Tarai districts conspicuously fell short,” Dr Suwal said, explaining, “This means lots of families have settled in Tarai districts after selling their properties in the hills. The final census reports will exactly show how widely people have migrated in the wake of the conflict and other unrests.”

CBS says it requires around four months for decoding and analyzing the data collected in the course of the 11 days field work of the census. The preliminary reports of the census are expected to come out later in October.