By 30th September is deadline extension when people can get counted electronically. At its meeting today the Council of Ministers amended Decision №61 dated 21st January 2021 which stipulated that people can get counted electronically from 7th to 17th September.
The National Statistical Institute opens help centre for assistance on questions for the census for citizens and enumerators. The centre opens its doors today, 16th September, and will work every day from 9 a.m. till 6 p.m., also at weekends. It is located in the NSI building in Sofia on 2, Panayot Volov Str.
Massive artificially generated malicious traffic caused the difficulties in the first days in completing the electronic questionnaire. It became clear from the report by the National Statistical Institute presented to the Parliamentary Committee on Digitalization, E-government and Information Technology. NSI President Sergey Tsvetarsky was heard at the meeting of the commission.
As to 12.00 today 459 118 persons living in about 200 000 households got counted electronically. During the last three days regardless of the hitches around 100 000 persons a day got counted. Despite this fact, the rates are low, said the President of the National Statistical Institute in an interview to Bulgarian News Agency.
In connection with the announcement by State e-Government Agency, NSI clarifies:
Census 2021 Information System is owned by NSI and this morning an attack attempt against it has been prevented. It has not occurred an accident to be reported, since the attempt has been blocked still at the first protection level (Census information website).
Overloading the connections between the data exchange systems of the different institutions is a separate problem.
Registration in the Census 2021 electronic system has already been recovered. However, the system works with significantly reduced capacity after today afternoon the connection with registers of other institutions was difficult. This was the reason why people trying to get counted saw an error message on their screens.
Technical teams scrutinize the platform work and they will gradually increase its capacity.
The information has not been affected and all data submitted by counting are protected.
On 7th September, at 10 a.m., the Deputy Prime Minister Atanas Pekanov and the NSI President Sergey Tsvetarsky will launch officially Census 2021 with a press conference in the Granite Hall in the Council of Ministers. In the event will also take part the NSI Deputy President Diana Yancheva and Magdalena Kostova, Director of Demographic and Social Statistics Directorate. The launch will be live streamed on the NSI websites and NSI social media.
The long-awaited start of the 18th population and housing census in Bulgaria will be signalled at 0:00 on 7th September 2021. Then the Census Information System will be launched and everyone who lives permanently in Bulgaria can get counted online. We recommend this way because it is fast, easy, comfortable and in pandemic conditions – safe. After that the meeting with an enumerator will be only for submitting the unique 15-digit code to be generated by the system when successful counting is completed.
For almost century and a half censuses in our country have been following all significant events in Bulgarian history. In 1880 by virtue of the Decree issued by Prince Alexander I the Statistical Department at the Ministry of Finance was established and its first task was to organize and conduct a census. On 1st January 1881 the first population census in the Principality of Bulgaria was conducted. In the young Bulgarian state at that time 2 007 919 persons lived while the average number of people per household was 6.
The electronic questionnaire comprises questions in four main sections – address, dwelling, household and population. The fifth one – temporarily present persons – is filled in only in case that during the census there are people who do not usually live in the dwelling – for example, guests for a few days. You could see a paper questionnaire sample on the link. The electronic questionnaire comprises the same information with only the information about the building excluded.