NUR-SULTAN / ex ASTANA (KazInform) — Nationwide census will be held in Kazakhstan from September 1 till October 30, 2021, Statistics Bureau of the Kazakh Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms announced.

The census will take place under the motto Everyone is important in Kazakhstan! This year all citizens of Kazakhstan will have an opportunity to fill out all necessary applications online individually via sanaq.gov.kz website starting from September 1 and through October 15, 2021.

The traditional in-person census will kick off on October 1 and run through October 30, 2021 for those who didn’t fill out the applications online.

A census is the procedure of systematically calculating, acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include the census of agriculture, and other censuses such as the traditional culture, business, supplies, and traffic censuses. The United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as “individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined periodicity”, and recommends that population censuses be taken at least every ten years. United Nations recommendations also cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, classifications and other useful information to co-ordinate international practices.

Population counting arose in antiquity in connection with the tax and military activities of states and the tasks of their administrative structure. The ancient Indian laws of Manu prescribed rulers to count the inhabitants in order to know their strength and determine taxes. In Egypt, population counts have been conducted since the era of the Ancient Kingdom (2800-2250 BC). At the same time there is information about population counts in ancient Mesopotamia. There is evidence that population records were kept in ancient China and ancient Japan. The results of population records were used for military and fiscal purposes. Such population records were similar in character to the population records of the early feudal states of America, which were conducted shortly before colonization by Europeans.

In the Novgorod Republic and some Russian principalities a census of the population for taxation has been conducted since the second half of the 13^th century. In Russia the first census with fiscal purposes was carried out in 1245. Under Peter I two censuses were conducted. In 1710 the tsar ordered “to take the fairy tales from every villager to show how many males there were in every village.” These censuses were not general, and the information was collected for collecting taxes and for organizing the draft of men into the army. The first full-fledged census in Russia was taken in 1897.