BPS to cooperate with affluent apartment managements for May census.

The Central Statistics Agency's (BPS) Jakarta bureau is planning to cooperate with managements of affluent apartments and housing complexes to ensure participation of their residents in the upcoming census.

”Most residents living in a high-class apartments or affluent housing complexes are very mobile and also putting a high level of concern on security,” agency head Agus Suherman told The Jakarta Post over the weekend.

“That’s why it is important to seek support from their management or local staffers whom the residents are already familiar with to help us arranging interview sessions.”

If it is difficult for the managements to grant a wide access to census officers to conduct their business, Agus said.

The managements could still help the agency with many other ways, for example by deploying security guards to accompany the officers running door-to-door interview, assigning local staffers to be trained as census officers, or, at very least, providing their tenants’ email addresses and let the agency send questions form via emails, he said.

“We’re trying our best to avoid handing out question papers to apartment tenants and let them independently fill the papers out because we have learned that only a small percentage of the papers were finally returned,” he said.

The government will run in May the national census, held once a decade, to record information about the country’s citizens, such as education, employment and housing.

In Jakarta , more than 20,000 census officers will be assigned to run the project.