Rafizi sees 10 million Padu signups by March 31 deadline

KUALA LUMPUR: With nearly 400,000 new registrations at the Central Database Hub (Padu) on Tuesday, Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli predicted a late rush will push the total past 10 million by the deadline to sign up at the end of the month.

He said this meant Malaysians were more informed about cybersecurity matters, as his disclosure of over two million hacking attempts of the database did not deter them.

“We’re seeing registrations for Padu increasing daily and I feel part of it is because we have this culture of doing things ‘last minute’.

“Yesterday was 400,000. “Previously throughout the month of February despite the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DoSM) putting out booths and so on, it was only around 60,000 daily registries. When we had a press conference on Padu on March 18, the next day registrations increased from 70,000 to 220,000.

“So, from there it went up and down and yesterday was 400,000.

“If it goes up or not I cannot tell but the factor of last minute is in our culture. So if say today we’re at 8.4 million we have around five days to go and I think we should be able to cross 10 million.

“That’s the figure we feel is good because we have nine million households and with this figure there should have a 70 per cent verification rate,” he said yesterday after the launch of the Kuala Lumpur 20 (KL20) blueprint at Parliament.

Rafizi also pointed out that critics of Padu system were relatively few.

He further said that Malaysians understood that registering with Padu would better inform the government’s future policies on subsidies.

He assured the public that the information they submitted to Padu was safe and protected, and dismissed the criticism of the initiative as normal for any new policy.

“Please be aware that those making noise against Padu never raised a question against private companies like those managing e-wallets.

“(They) never asked if the data is encrypted. You see no one has been able to hack into Padu because the data is encrypted as well.

“It’s a credit to the civil service and the myriad of agencies who’re working tirelessly for a year to make this a possibility,” he added.