A Tk 3500-crore project to conduct the sixth population and housing censuses 2021 has been recently placed in the Planning Commission for approval. The last population census was published in 2011. Every 10 years, the government conducts population and housing censuses. Bangladesh has an estimated (as of 2019) population of 163.05 million, up from the 2013 estimate of 156.5 million. This makes Bangladesh the 8th most populous country in the world. The country has a population density of 1,115.62 people per square kilometer, (2,889.45/square mile), which ranks 10th in the world. The surface area in Bangladesh is currently at 147,570 km² (or 56,977 square miles).
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) has prepared the project to be implemented in four phases. The project estimates of Tk 3500 crore which will come partly from the government’s exchequer and the development partners. Of the total amount, Tk 2564.72 crore will come from the government and the rest of Tk 935.28 crore will come from the foreign agencies.
Sources said that the authority is seeking fund from six international development partners to implement the project. The organizations are UNFPA, DFID, European Union, USAID and Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA). The project evaluation committee (PEC) of the planning commission has followed fixing the project expenditure as per the agriculture census.
The project was supposed to start in January 2019. However, due to disapproval, it was not possible to start the project on time. It is now expected to be completed by 2023 and published the same year. Meanwhile, first population and housing censuses were conducted across the country in 1974 after independence. The other four censuses were conducted in 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011 respectively.
In 2011, a total of 3.10 lakh supervisors worked for conducting the census. The sixth population and housing census is estimated to require 4.92 lakh supervisors. Of the four phases of the project, the first one will mainly focus on collecting basic characteristics of all households and population. Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) machine will be used for this purpose.
Post-enumeration quality check will be done in the second phase to determine the coverage and content error of the main census. During the final phase, socio-economic data will be collected from one percent of the total population. The census would help the government and other stakeholders to address many issues, as it would reveal the latest information about population, education, migration, income, expenditure, disability and marital status. Bangladesh is the third most populated country in South-East Asia after India and Pakistan.
