PADU website crawls as Malaysians rush to register

Nothing like a stampede to bring things to a crawl. Following the launch of the Pangkalan Data Utama (PADU) socio-economic database yesterday, the expected slew of people heading to the site to register resulted in congestion and the inevitable slow – or no – load times.

As Bernama reports, the clamour to register with PADU reportedly made the website difficult, and in many cases impossible, to access. Some social media users said they could not access the website because of the high traffic volume, while others claimed their attempts to register got stuck when they did not receive an OTP SMS.

One user suggested that apart from using OTP SMS, which is only valid for five minutes, the authorities should upgrade the system with a multiple verification function to ease the registration process for new users. However, economy Minister Rafizi Ramli said complaints on the OTP issue that have been received so far only involved Celcom users and not subscribers of other telcos, and that the problem had been solved by 3.30pm yesterday.

PADU website crawls as Malaysians rush to register

Away from the OTP issue, the site was still far from operating smoothly into the wee hours of the morning today, with colleague Danny Tan reporting that his attempt to register (at 2am) resulted in a stuck screen with no button to press.

Despite the hiccups, Rafizi said that more than 70,000 registrations had been made on the system at 5pm, four hours after it was launched, with 60% of these completed with e-KYC validation.

In any case, you don’t really have to rush (such a Malaysian thing, at the start and towards a deadline) to register, as you have until March 31 to update your info on the database. This can either be done online via the PADU portal, or offline in the case of those living in rural areas and those without internet access. In such cases, registering and updating of details can be done at district offices, village community management councils (MPKK) and with local authorities.

As Rafizi has mentioned, registration is not mandatory, and no action will be taken if individuals choose not to update, but opting out might affect their eligibility for targeted subsidies if the data on hand wasn’t accurate. All citizens aged 18 years and above should register and update their data on the PADU portal by verifying 39 items concerning personal information.

PADU is an integrated national socio-economic database combining all available data of individuals and households collected from government departments and agencies, with 70 of these being at the federal level. In the near term, the data in it will be used as a key component in how the government retargets subsidies and assistance, with household net disposable income metrics set to be used to provide a fair picture of the socio-economic position of every Malaysian household.

Its introduction paves the way for the targeted subsidy of RON 95 petrol, which is set to happen in the second half of 2024, although the mechanism to determine subsidy has yet to be revealed. Targeted subsidy of electricity is in the plans too.

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