Tangerang needs more e-ID kits

The Tangerang municipal administration failed to meet the deadline to complete the registration of eligible residents for electronic identity cards (e-ID).

As of Dec. 19, only 18.44 percent, or 199,361 residents, had been registered out of the municipality’s 1,081,926 residents targeted by the Home Ministry by Dec. 31.

“The ministry has yet to disburse an adequate number of equipment kits to produce e-IDs,” Mulyanto, head of the demography department at the municipal Vital Statistic Agency told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

According to Mulyanto, one equipment kit unit consisting of finger printing tools, a signature pad, a server model or PC and a camera is earmarked to serve as many as 15,000 residents in each district.

 ”Since Tangerang municipality has a total of 13 districts and the population of each district is over 30,000 people, it means that the municipality needs 68 equipment kit units, but the ministry had only sent 34 so far,” he said.

The agency proposed putting the most populous districts on the top of the registration list, including Cipondoh, Karawaci, Pinang, Cileduk, Karang Tengah, Larangan and Cibodas.

At the provincial level, the registration in three designated regions — Tangerang municipality, Cilegon municipality and Serang regency — had only reached 419,676 residents (18.56 percent) out of a total of 2,480,683.

“We could have worked faster than this if we had received the equipment kits in accordance with the regions’ needs,” said Anwar Sulaiman, head of the administrative bureau at the Banten provincial government.

He said that the administration would start the registration at Serang municipality, South Tangerang municipality, Tangerang, Lebak and Pandeglang regencies early next year.

“We have allocated a total of Rp 1 billion in financial assistance in the 2012 budget for each region to implement the program,” Anwar said, adding that the sum of financial assistance was determined based on each region’s proposal.

Oong Sugiartono, head of the demography department at the Tangerang regency vital statistics sub-agency, said that the regency is also ready to implement e-ID registrations next year, as it had registered 853,440 eligible residents in 29 districts.

“We have a good head start. We have currently registered up to 80 percent of residents, although the official work would only commence early next year.

“We will soon submit the demography identity numbers (NIK) of residents to district offices so that the district offices can distribute the numbers to each resident,” he said.