Census runs slowly at apartments

A woman carrying a bag of vegetables passed through an apartment lobby in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, when a census officer asked to interview her for five minutes on Tuesday.
“Five minutes? I don’t have that much time,” said the lady, who resides in the apartment block while quickly shaking her head.
The officer later gave her an envelope containing a questionnaire and asked her to return it as soon as possible.
Many apartment tenants in the city seem reluctant to participate in the first week of the nationwide census, which has been conducted every decade since independence.
Many refused to be briefed by census officers while others said they found it difficult to fill out the questionnaire.
Ellegreen Veranes, a 24-year-old university student living in the Mediterania Boulevard apartment block, said she needed more than 30 minutes to complete the questionnaire, which contained 21 questions.
“I don’t know how to fill the boxes in the form so I left them blank,” she said.
A census officer helped her at the census desk at the apartment’s lobby.
With many apartment managers refusing to grant census officers access to tenants, the officers have to deliver the questionnaires to tenants in several ways, including leaving forms with apartment managers and waiting for tenants to pass through the lobby.
Zen Abdul Rohman, a census field coordinator for in apartment buildings in Kemayoran district, said most of the managers of the 26 apartment blocks in his area supported the census by allocating the officers a space in their lobbies.
He said some apartment managements allowed door-to-door canvassing under some conditions, such as limiting it to weekdays.
However, even the help of apartment managers cannot guarantee that the majority of tenants would be willing to fill out the census forms.
As of Tuesday afternoon, census officers at the Mediterania Boulevard apartment had only collected five of 70 forms they had handed out to tenants in the lobby since Monday.
More than 700 tenants live in the apartment block.
Adrianis, another census officer assigned to the Sudirman Park apartment block in Karet, Central Jakarta, said he had only collected 40 questionnaires.
He handed out 1,000 to the apartment management a week ago as they did not provide a space for the census officer in their lobby.
The apartment’s main lobby did not feature any banners alerting the tenants to the presence of census officers when The Jakarta Post visited on Tuesday.
Suprihanto, an employee from the apartment management team who said he helped with the census, said that if the number of tenants who returned the questionnaires was not low this week, then the apartment management would allow door-to-door canvassing next week.
Census questionnaire for apartment tenants feature fewer variables.
The head of the Jakarta office of the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), Agus Suherman, said his office had reduced the number of questions from 43 to 21 as some questions were irrelevant to those living in apartments.
Questions in the 2010 census include indicators of the UN Millennium Development Goals such as basic education, gender equality in education and employment, infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, proportion of population cooking with firewood, access to drinking water and basic sanitation facilities and housing conditions.
The data from the census will also provide the base for the issuance of a single identity number.