Hussaini Boys Higher Secondary School in Karachi’s Nazimabad area is nearly empty on a Tuesday morning in February 2017. None of its 650 or so students are in sight. The only rooms occupied in the school’s recently-renovated building are a chemistry lab, the principal’s office and a classroom.

In the principal’s office, a few teachers sit marking examination papers and drinking tea. They are preparing results, to be announced on March 31. Sitting in the chemistry lab are a number of government schoolteachers who have just returned from fieldwork, waiting for their supervisor to tell them what to do next. They are all working as enumerators for the ongoing sixth national census.

The school is not officially closed, according to a chemistry teacher, but the focus of its work has shifted away from classes and students to census-related activities. Most of her male colleagues have been assigned duties to collect census data. They have been in the field most of the day, going from one house to the next, marking buildings and counting their residents.

She is in school to help any students who might have any queries related to studies or exams. The school is planning to resume classes from April 1 to help matriculation and intermediate students with syllabus revisions before the start of their examinations, she says on the condition of anonymity. “Let’s see what happens,” she adds, as she asks a peon to call students on their cell phones and ask them to come in for a quiz.

Even the start of the new school year on April 1 is likely to be delayed due to the census, she says. Then summer vacations will start and the academic year will effectively start only in the middle of August.

Parts of many school buildings in Karachi cannot be used for academic purposes because they have been designated as bases for the census enumerators deployed in the areas around them. Government Boys and Girls School in Nazimabad No 5 in Karachi is one such institution.

The headmistress there – also working as a superintendent for the census enumerators – says she is worried about having to make adjustments for letting the school serve as a local base for the census, while at the same time having to make it available as a centre for matriculation and intermediate exams. “We have to provide a good atmosphere, rooms and furniture to the children taking exams. We cannot force them to take exams in the outdoors.”

The census has coincided with the busiest part of the academic calendar

Many government schools in Lahore, too, have been informally closed through the latter half of March for the same census-related reasons. Only a couple of teachers can be spotted in some of them, waiting for parents intending to admit their children for the next academic year. Classes do not seem to be going on. There are hardly any teachers in schools, says Rana Liaquat, an official of the schoolteachers union in Lahore.

The census has coincided with the busiest part of the academic calendar. Government schools conduct their internal exams in February and March. Board exams for classes five and eight (in Punjab) also take place in these two months. This year, these activities overlapped with the census enumerators’ training. These are then usually followed by matriculation and intermediate exams in April and May — happening almost concurrently with the two-phased census exercise this time round.

These overlaps came up for discussion when the Council of Common Interests – that has highest-level representation from all the four provinces and the federal government – and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the federal department mandated to carry out the census, met in December last year.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan had ordered the federal government to initiate the census as early as the middle of March 2017 but the participants of the meeting wanted to ensure that enough government teachers, along with other employees, could be spared for it. As per PBS calculations, the census required more than 84,000 enumerators and most of them were to be schoolteachers.

Rahila Masroor, a census coordinator at the deputy commissioner’s office in Karachi’s Central district, has been a part of the census work since early February. A master trainer, she trained 359 teachers on how to fill the census forms and mark homes and shops. Later, she worked as a member of the vigilance committee that supervised the collection of census data in areas such as Nazimabad, Gulberg, North Nazimabad and New Karachi. She says senior government officials in Karachi were initially “concerned” and “confused” as to how data collection for the census could happen at the same time as board exams.

These concerns and confusions led to several consultations between the PBS and Sindh government officials. As a result, the provincial education department decided that exams for classes nine and 10 will be rescheduled. Instead of conducting them in one go, as is usually done, they will be split in two phases — students taking the exams in the general and arts groups will appear in the first phase (from March 28 to April 15) and those in the science group will appear in the second phase (from April 15 to May 3).

This is how Khalid Ehsan, acting controller of examinations at the Board of Secondary Education Karachi, explains the reason behind this decision: since most of the census enumerators are male teachers from government schools, the board will not have enough male invigilators to supervise the exams.

The science group has more than 300,000 candidates in Karachi alone and, thus, requires a high number of invigilators. “So, we decided it would be best to hold exams for the science group between April 15 and May 3 (during the gap in the two phases of the census).” On the other hand, those appearing in the general and arts group exams number only 50,000 or so (in Karachi). Their exams started on March 28 and will continue simultaneously with the census.

In Punjab, the education authorities have not changed their examination schedule, though this decision seems to have a visible impact on academic activities. Out of 7,000 (male) teachers in Lahore, for instance, 3,000 have been engaged to carry out the census, according to Kashif Shahzad Chaudhry, secretary general of the Punjab Teachers Union. Another 1,500 of them will be working as invigilators for the exams, leaving only 2,500 male teachers in the city to conduct classes, he says.

Another teacher in Lahore criticises the government’s priorities in employing more teachers than other officials for the census. “The census is being allowed to overlap with exams,” he says, on the condition of anonymity, only because education is not the government’s priority.

One of his colleagues believes the government could have “waited till the summer vacations” to conduct the census. But summer vacations will begin with the fasting month of Ramzan this year and the weather will be too hot for census-related fieldwork in the months after Ramzan. In any case, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has not left the government with the option to postpone the census.

Senior education officials in Lahore, however, insist there has been next to no disruption of academic activities as a result of the census. First and foremost, says Tariq Rafique, chief executive of the Lahore District Education Authority, the government has not shut schools down during the census “because we do not want children to be roaming around” and because “[we wanted] admissions to start on time”. Secondly, he says, all female teachers in government schools are doing their routine duties since they are not engaged in census-taking activities. “If there is staff deficiency in one school, we are ready to temporarily shift teachers to it from another.”

Many teachers deployed for census duties are not happy with the work assigned to them. “As teachers, we should have some kind of dignity and respect,” one of them says in Lahore, suggesting that going door to door to count homes and people, while facing all kinds of receptions from people, is not what a teacher should be subjected to.

“We are not even asked if we can do such duties,” he says, without wanting to be named because census enumerators are barred from talking to the media. “We are only told that taking the census is our national obligation.”

“We were told that one block has 250 houses but we are finding that there are 500 to 700 houses in one block.”

According to Rafique, teachers have been employed for the census for a practical reason. “We need to have educated people [for filling the census forms].” Not that people from other departments have not been engaged but, he says, “teachers are most in demand for this kind of work”.

Some teachers are not sure if they will get the remuneration promised to them for peforming census duties. “We were promised 17,000 rupees for covering one census block (comprising roughly 250 houses),” one of them says, fearing the government will not pay the promised money. “I have done census duties in the past. The government went back on its word and did not give full payment, saying the budget had shrunk.”

He also complains that census takers lack access to official transport and meals. “The government has not bothered to provide census teams with food and water,” he says, adding that many enumerators are paying out of their own pockets to travel from their homes to the census blocks assigned to them that, in some cases, are far away from where they live.

He is also upset over the amount of work assigned to the enumerators. “We were told that one block has 250 houses but we are finding that there are 500 to 700 houses in one block.” The government has not deployed additional enumerators to count people in these additional houses, he says.

Senior officials concede there are many problems in coordinating and conducting the census. But these are mainly because of shortage of manpower, says Rafique. “We do not have enough people for this job.”

This was originally published in the Herald's April 2017 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.