Depok imposes fee on newcomers

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Depok Mayor: Nur Mahmudi Ismail: (JP/Arief Suhardiman)

Ilham Saputra, 25, can finally relax as he is now an official Depok resident after paying Rp 100,000 (US$10.49) to have his previous identity card from Bima, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), changed.

He can now fulfill the administrative requirements that require a local ID card to open a bank account and get a driver’s license.

When he arrived in Depok nine months ago, he was reluctant to register for a local ID card. He was unaware, however, of a 2012 bylaw stipulating that everyone who wanted to have new ID card was required to pay an extra fee.

“I didn’t mind paying the fee because it was important for me to have a Depok ID card,” he told The Jakarta Post.

“The sum of money I spent was nothing compared to the benefits I will gain in being able to handle my personal documents.”

In contrast to Ilham, another Depok resident, Muhammad Azis, considered the obligatory payment for the ID card a waste of money. Hence, when the Sawangan resident was about to apply for a Depok ID card two months ago, he refused to pay the fee.

“I didn’t know that it was stipulated in the bylaw; there hadn’t been any information disseminated about it. I thought the officials at the community and neighborhood units were playing tricks on me,” he said.

Azis, however, finally agreed to pay the fee as he needed to complete the administrative requirements for a mortgage.

The head of the population division at the Depok Population and Civil Registration Agency, Epiyanti, said the fees were aimed at curbing the increasing rate of newcomers arriving in Jakarta’s satellite city.

Besides being designed to reduce the rate of urbanization, Depok Mayor Nurmahmudi said the fees were also intended as a source of regional income.

He expects the city to generate Rp 1.1 billion from the fees, equal to the 11,000 people entering the city this year.

Epiyanti said the target had been surpassed because more than 20,264 people had registered as Depok residents from January to August, while only 11,823 people moved out of the city.

The agency also recorded that the total number of residents in the 200.29-square-kilometer city had increased by up to 70 percent in the past 10 years. More than 1.8 million people currently live in Depok, up from 1.1 million in 2000.

The population distribution in Depok has also steadily increased by 5 percent each year. Now 9,055 people reside in every one-square-kilometer of the city’s area.

Epiyanti said that another way to curb the urbanization was by conducting identity-card raids following Idul Fitri holidays.

The high number of newcomers in Depok, and Jakarta’s other satellite cities, has prompted fewer newcomers to settle in the capital Jakarta after Idul Fitri this year. A total of 47,832 people arrived in the capital this year, a drop from the 51,875 recorded last year.