Govt revamps transmigration ministry
Govt revamps transmigration ministry
JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Transmigration Siswono Yudohusodo is revamping his office, creating a new directorate general to lead the campaign to encourage more people to migrate from one place to another.
Siswono told reporters on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the first government's transmigration program that he is dividing the Directorate General for Mobilization and Development into two: The Directorate General for Mobilization and Placement and the Directorate General for Guidance and Transmigration Communities.
The plan, he added, has been approved by President Soeharto.
He said the officials to head the directorates have not yet been chosen.
After the restructuring, the ministry will have three directorate generals. The other one will be the Directorate General of Settlement and Environment.
One of the main tasks of the director general for mobilization and placement is to lead the campaign among particularly sedentary ethnic groups to develop a taste for migration in search of a better life.
"The migrating habit must not be limited to Batak, Minang and Bugis peoples," Siswono said, referring to ethnic groups respectively from North Sumatra, West Sumatra and South Sulawesi.
"The Sundanese, the Javanese, Madurese, the Balinese and the Sasak must all be encouraged to develop a similar culture," he said. This, he added, will encourage more people to migrate rather than wait for government's encouragement.
The transmigration program is an ambitious project to resettle millions of people from the islands of Java, Bali and Lombok to other lesser populated islands in the archipelago.
The sedentary attitude of the people in these three islands however has made it difficult for the government to encourage people to join the transmigration program, in spite of promises of a better life and financial incentives from the state.
Other factors are the lack of coordination and the lack of "understanding" which can affect international assistance to the program, the minister said.
He said the government is also campaigning to attract more skilled people to join and help the development of economically backward areas such as Irian Jaya, the Mentawai Islands in West Sumatra, Kalimantan and Maluku.
Siswono said that today's commemoration will be used chiefly to contemplate on the shortcomings of the transmigration program after the first batch of settlers was sent to South Lampung on Dec. 12, 1950.
He said one of the problems with the transmigration program in the past was that it had been too bound by its own targets to shift as many people as possible, often at the expense of quality.
This, he explained, had boomeranged back on the government's program during the Fourth Five Year Plan in 1984-1989 because many settlers returned to their old homes with horrible stories of their experiences.
During that Five-Year Plan, the government resettled 750,100 families compared to a target of 750,000 families.
Learning from that experience, the government moderated its target in the Fifth Five Year Plan to 500,000 families, and even then only 265,259 of were resettled, he said.
In the current Sixth Five Year Plan which began in April last year, the government has set a target of resettling 600,000 families.
Since 1950, the transmigration program has sent around 1.9 million families to more than 3,000 resettlement sites, and parceled out more than 1.9 million hectares of land. (anr)