Applying for my daughter's Identity Card

It is mandatory for any Malaysian citizen that has reached 12 years old to apply for a national identification card. My eldest daughter's 12th birthday was on the 5th of September. This means, that this weekend, she needs to go to Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara (JPN) to apply for her identity card.

There is a branch of JPN located in Shah Alam. I have been there for few times. However, I prefer not to go to the Shah Alam branch. It is usually crowded and the waiting times are much longer.

Yesteryear, I went to a branch in UTC Keramat for identity card replacement. The JPN branch in UTC Keramat was not as crowded as the one in Shah Alam. We plan to go to my mom's house last weekend. Since UTC Keramat and my mom's house is near, my eldest daughter and I went to UTC Keramat.

Urban Transformation Center or UTC in short has a lot of government offices inside their premises such as JPN, Immigration, and the Department of Road Transport. You can consider UTC as a one-stop center for making government-related documents.

What I like about UTC is, that they operate during the weekend and their operation hour start from 8 am until 9 pm. This is really convenient because I have limited time during weekdays due to my workload.

We reach at UTC Keramat at 10 am. Upon arriving, I straight away go to the queue ticket counter to take our queue number. However, the staff requested that I fill up the Identity Card Request form and see the required documents before he can give a queue number.

The required document that I need to bring was my daughter's birth certificate, father or mother's identity card, and a copy of the identity card. The documents then need to be attached to the Identity Card Request form.

After filling up the form and attaching the documents, I went again to the queue ticket counter. Once the staff has verified the form and documents, he then proceeds to generate a queue number.

We got a queue number of 5059. But the current number was just 5058. After waiting for 6 to 7 minutes our number was displayed on the monitor. We were redirected to counter number 14 for identity card processing.

The staff that handled our request was fast. She was able to process our request within 10 minutes. After that, my daughter was redirected to the photo booth to take her latest photograph. No fees were imposed because this is my daughter's first request for National Identity Card.

The only downside was, that there are no card printing done during the weekend. This means I need to come back to UTC Keramat during the weekdays to collect my daughter's identity card.