Although data collection for the Census of Slum and Floating Population 2014 finished on May 2, many slum dwellers claimed that the enumerators had not visited them to collect their details.
Most slums in the capital were excluded from the list, those that was created through the first and second zonal operations before conducting the census.
AKM Ashraful Haque, deputy director of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), told the Dhaka Tribune: “The enumerators collected information from the slums in Mirpur 1 and 10, Shishumela, Asadgate, Gulshan 1 and 2, Kochukhet, Badda, Airport, Shahbagh, GPO, Motijheel, Banani, Agargaon and Gabtoli areas.”
On the other hand, enumeration in the slums in Uttara sector 14, Uttarkhan, Dakkhinkhan, Mohakhali, Mohammadpur, Khilkhet, Kawran Bazar, Moghbazar and Shantinagar has not been done yet.
Khadiza Begum, 38, resident at Uttarkhan slum, said she was not aware of any slum census. “No one came to collect information in this slum,” she said.
Jahir Uddin, another slum-dweller in the city’s Shantinagar area, said: “We did not notice anyone visiting any homes to collect information about us. We the poor are always excluded from everything.”
The data collection had started on April 25 this year.
Although it was required to mark the doors of the slums that had been surveyed with chalks, this reporter did not find said mark in many slum shacks.
In an explanation, Ashraful said: “The marks could be removed for many reasons, like rain, but it is not important during a census at all.”
On the other hand, some of the city’s homeless people also claimed that they had not been counted.
Mujib and Ashraf, two homeless men living in the Airport railway station, alleged that no one had come to collect information on them in the area.
“We were present at the area at night during the time of the survey. No one came,” they said.
Jafor Ahmed Khan, project director and director (deputy secretary) of BBS’s Demography and Health Wing, said: “I do not think we missed any slums or homeless people. Our team worked very hard in order to collect accurate information.
“There will be allegations. We saw no problem in the data collection. If we could not find a person, then we collected his/her information from others,” he added.
Wasimul Bari, lecturer at the statistics, biostatistics and informatics department in Dhaka University, told the Dhaka Tribune: “The census has to cover the entire target populace, otherwise it will not be accurate. But sometimes government officials skip duties, which is not right.”
He said if the enumerators could not find a person, they should visit the place again. “Information given from neighbours or other people could be inaccurate,” he added.
The government allotted around Tk9.32 crore for the census. Around 6,500 enumerators and 1,150 supervisors were assigned for data collection.
The full report of the census is expected to be published in December this year.