The Bulgarians living abroad will be able to participate in an unofficial online census that was launched on Tuesday.

The census could be found at the website http://www.iniesme.bg/.

The project "Let the other part of Bulgaria take part in the census" is an initiative of the party "The Other Bulgaria". Partners are the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad, Bulgarian National Television World, Bulgarian News Agency, The Association of Bulgarian Media Abroad, the Institute of Social Surveys and Marketing MBMD, and the National Statistics Institute (NSI).

However, NSI denied the information and said they did not give consent to the party "The Other Bulgaria" to be their partners.

"The census of Bulgarian nationals living abroad is carried out by the statistics units in the respective countries where they live," NSI said.

The main goal of the initiative is to establish the exact number of Bulgarian expats. According to Bozhidar Tomalevski, chair of "The Other Bulgaria", preliminary data shows the number is about 3.5 million.

The questionnaire that has to be filled by the respondents includes questions on whether the expats send money to Bulgaria, whether they are content with their home country's treatment towards them and whether they plan to come home some day.

The final data will be provided for processing to NSI and the results will be provided to the institutions, the initiators said.

According to Emil Rusanov, editor of the newspaper "Budilnik" ("Alarm Clock") in the UK, this is the first such large-scale census of Bulgarian expats, who need their home country's attention.

In his words, the fact that the census in carried out online will not be a problem for the Bulgarian nationals living abroad.

"In Bulgaria about 50% of the population uses the Internet, while abroad, the number is about 80%," he said. 

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