PETALING JAYA: Rafizi Ramli announced that the national central database hub (Padu) will be fully owned and made by the government without any involvement from private contractors. This came from a Facebook post on Thursday (Dec 28) when the Economy Minister outlined that Padu was a fully internal government project developed through the joint efforts of only civil servants from various agencies.
In the process, his ministry, the Statistics Department and the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (Mampu) were involved along with cooperation from other relevant agencies. Rafizi also emphasized that no external consultants and contractors were involved, and the database utilized existing allocations and infrastructure, bypassing the need for new tenders to private parties and not involving extra spending that is common with new government systems.
He further explained that there would be no annual payments made to private system providers and that the system would be open for three months for users to verify and update their socioeconomic data, acquired from over 270 government databases. The goal is to ensure fairness to acquire targeted subsidies by allowing people to verify and update their details accordingly.
Additionally, Rafizi praised the work of the civil servants who developed the system within a relatively short period of seven months from May to December. He claimed that Padu’s execution, development and implementation had surpassed previous privately-run system projects in terms of being able to meet the needs of the people and government within such a short period.
Padu, set to be open for user registration from Jan 2, aims to be a national database of socioeconomic information for every household in the country. The goal is to provide regular analytics with a comprehensive store of data updated in “near real time” to allow better data-driven policymaking and decision-making, while enabling targeted implementation. The system, announced by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim back in May, has been in development since June and will see integration with MyDigital ID, the country’s national digital identification system, at a later date.
