Census starts next March

The count of population and dwellings, an operation to cost some 800bn lei and take up more than 7,000 people to do it, is to be conducted on March 18, 2002, Aurel Camara, chairman of the National Statistics Institute (INS) said.

“The census has been postponed indefinitely for no good reason, but we are making a huge effort and vow to have it conducted in March 2002,” Camara was quoted as saying by Mediafax.

The Government had previously scheduled the census for March 2001. The commission to organise and co-ordinate the census is to be put together in one week, as stipulated in a Government decision published in the Official Gazette last Wednesday.

The INS chairman showed that the institution he ran had contacted the Finance Ministry to decide on the necessary financial resources.

“In 2001, we will have to take some 140bn lei from the Government’s budgetary reserve to make the necessary preparations, that is printing of the forms to be used and training the people,” Aurel Camara specified.

The centralisation of the data collected during the census in March and the presentation of the preliminary results might be done by the end of 2002.

The purpose of the census is to obtain accurate information as to the exact number and territorial distribution of the people in Romania, along with the population’s cultural and economic structures, as well as about the housing figures and the population’s living conditions.