Sri Lanka to hold first post-war census in March

AFP | The Gulf Today
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Sri Lanka will hold its first post-war census in March which will cover the entire Indian Ocean island for the first time in over 30 years, officials said on Wednesday.

The Department of Census and Statistics will launch the initiative on March 20, gathering information on demographics, education, computer literacy, migration and sanitation in homes.

"It will be our first full survey since 1981," the statistics office Director General Suranjana Vidyaratne told reporters.

"The war in the north and east had earlier stopped us from doing detail island wide census."

The Tamil Tigers were crushed in a military offensive in May 2009 that ended 37-years of ethnic bloodshed, which the United Nations estimated claimed some 100,000 lives.

The department had originally scheduled the census for July last year, but Vidyaratne said they needed more time to complete their work.

Some 80,000 people will be deployed across the country to collect preliminary data in February ahead of the main census day.

© AFP