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Suspicious citizens can use e-KTP to catch polygamous spouses
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One man, one identity: An official at the Home Affairs Ministry demonstrates how a device reads a chip inside an electronic identification card (e-KTP). (kompas.com/Hendra A. Setyawan))
T
he introduction of electronic identification cards (e-KTP) will not only simplify population data management, but also help women discover whether their husbands have more than one spouse, a government official said.
Home Affairs Ministry director general for population and civil registry Zudan Arif Fakrulloh said with the e-KTP's introduction, every person will have a unique citizen identity number (NIK) that allows the person to register his or her name in a Family Card.
"I used to get complaints from people because they could no longer register three Family Cards at once,” Zudan said in his remarks during the signing ceremony of a memorandum of understanding between the ministry and local capital market entities at the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) building on Tuesday.
One man, he said, reported that his second wife had gotten angry because she could not register her husband’s data in the Family Card. The man had no option but to tell her the truth – that he had another wife.
"So the ladies here should check their Family Cards to ensure whether your husband's data is there," he said, making some members of his audience giggle.
Even if a person tried to register his data under an alias or a different address, the fingerprints and scanned retina kept during the initial data recording would prevent such attempts, Zudan said.
The ministry recorded 1.2 million citizens tried to register multiple IDs, but none of them were able to do so. (hwa)
