Better treatment for street vendors sought

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Analysts are calling on the city administration to manage street vendors in Jakarta appropriately because since the start of the economic crisis they have served as a social safety valve for many of Jakarta's poor.

Economist Didik J. Rachbini said the Jakarta administration lacked policies and programs to handle street vendors in the city, and it consequently looked for a quick and easy solution by conducting raids and evictions to deal with them.

"Given their immense contribution to the wellbeing of the city's population, the administration should come up with a regulation that will help them to flourish," Rachbini told The Jakarta Post on Monday.

He said that street vendors as part of the informal sector had thrived, while the government, still beset by the multi-faceted crisis, was unable to provide jobs for the city's population.

In 2002, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) revealed that out of 89.7 million people employed in the country, some 62 percent or 55.6 million people worked in the informal sector.

Street vendors, Didik added, could even be integrated into the formal sector as long as business entities were willing to accommodate them.

"Offices and supermarkets in the city's high rise buildings, for example will reap the benefit if they allocate space for food stalls, so that their employees can have easy access to cheap foods during lunch breaks," he said, adding that the two could go together.

City Bylaw No. 2/2002 on private markets stipulates that private shopping centers of over 500 square meters in size are required to allocate 20 percent of their space for street vendors. This ruling, however, is not properly implemented as there are only a few, if any, private shopping centers which are willing to do so.

Separately, the head of urban community division of the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH) Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto, said that the city administration had taken a wrong approach in dealing with street vendors.

"City officials perceive street vendors as a source of traffic congestion and garbage that hinder the implementation of proper city planning. They, therefore, solve such problems by removing them to isolated areas," Karbyanto said, adding that the new location sometimes was difficult for customers to reach.

He said that instead of removing street vendors, the city administration should keep them where they were and organized them in order that they did not take too much public space.

In some of the city's spots like Jatinegara in East Jakarta, Senen and Tanah Abang in Central Jakarta, where street vendors thrived, he demanded that the city administration remove the thugs (preman) who regularly extort money from them.

"If they don't have to give money to the thugs, all the money will go the city administration and it will be a great source of revenue," he told the Post.

Sharing the same conviction that the formal and informal sector could support each other, he said: "The likelihood of cooperation is great, but the informal sector is never given a chance."