Indonesia plans to launch a population census in the tsunami-hit province of Aceh in an effort to more accurately gauge how many peopled died in the disaster, officials said Tuesday.
Iskandar Asyeik of the Aceh Central Bureau of Statistics told AFP that 7,000 surveyors would gather data on the fallout from the December 26 disaster in a project expected to be completed in September.
"The census will start in August and the field work will take about one month while full data compilation will be completed by November," he said.
"We need more updated population data for Aceh, especially since the tsunami."
More than 131,000 people are believed to have lost their lives in Aceh, but with another 30,000 still listed as missing and many people interred unidentified into mass graves, there has been no accurate assessment.
The census in Aceh, expected to take four months, was being undertaken outside of Indonesia's standard once-a-decade national population survey program, the last one of which was completed in 2003.
He said the census, to be funded by the UN Population Fund, was also needed to provide accurate population data ahead of the direct elections for districts and provincial heads in Aceh scheduled for October.
Aceh had a population of 4.2 million people according to the 2003 national census.
