Dismissing media reports about an extension of the 11 days of counting, Deputy Director General of CBS Bikash Bishta said, “It would be against international standards to extend the period of the population count. Hence, news about the extension is absolutely baseless.” [break]
Earlier on Sunday, various news portals including state-owned Rashtriya Samachar Samiti (RSS) had reported the extension of the population count by five days. “If we extend the counting period against the set standards, we may have difficulty decoding and analyzing the statistics later,” Bishta said. “So, we ask everyone not to be misled. The population counting exercise is now formally over.”
On the last day of the counting for the 11th census, most of the 34,000 enumerators, especially those based in urban areas, collected details about homeless people. They woke up early morning well before dawn, and went out onto the streets, besides roaming the temples, to fill out questionnaire on homeless persons.
In some areas where the questionnaires were filled out mainly in the mornings and evenings, the enumerators worked before dawn and at noon too. “Here, in the past 10 days the enumerators had worked basically in the morning and evening to avoid the absence of heads of households, but on the last day they worked at other hours as well,” Shantwona Sharma, District Census Officer of Bhaktapur, told Republica.
With the counting of homeless people, including street children and mendicants, the most important part of the 11th census has come to an end. Now onward, CBS officials will be busy collecting the questionnaire forms from all 75 districts and analyzing the data.
The preliminary report of the census is expected to come out in four months. The country´s population is expected to have reached over 28.5 million.
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