Bahrain has become the first country in the region to use a state-of-the-art technology to collect data for the 2010 census, it was revealed.

It will cover details of population, housing, buildings, installations and agriculture, which will be collected by tapping into data registered in 300 government departments.

Addressing a press conference last night, CIO president Dr Mohammed Ahmed Alamer said the new method would cost BD1.6 million which was four times less than the previous census.

'The census 2010 is different because it uses the latest technological advancement by implementing a registered based census.

He spoke ahead of the 'time-reference day', which officially began at midnight, where volunteers logged on to the system to receive administrative records from the various governmental bodies to create a database.

Dr Alamer revealed that the preliminary results of the census will be published in June while the detailed result will be issued in December.

Meanwhile, CIO Information Technology Directorate director Shaikh Salman bin Mohammed Al Khalifa said the project has allocated 380 volunteers to carry out the sample survey on May 3.

'Enumerators will be divided into 140 teams which will go door to door to question 15,000 familes to get the missing information that we didn't collect from the administrative records.'

However, he said that the CIO will attempt to cut the manual labour by setting up a call centre.

'First we will allocate 30 enumerators to call the families to get the missing information that we didn't collect from the administrative records.

'If that fails then we will send the convoy to the streets where they will gather the rest of the needed data.'

The enumerators will use laptops to gather the information that will be connected to the main frame system, added Shaikh Salman.-TradeArabia News Service