Govt urged to promote reading habit

Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

In a bid to cultivate a reading habit on behalf of the public, the government and local administrations need to pour more funds into the improvement and establishment of public libraries throughout the archipelago, head of the National Library Dady Rahmananta has said.

"Reading makes a huge contribution to intellectual capacity, because, unlike watching audio-visual material, it allows people to develop their imagination, thereby exercising their brain," Dady said on the sidelines of a seminar on improving reading and learning habits on Monday.

The government, according to Dady, ought to establish as many libraries as possible so that people could borrow books for free.

According to Sumengen Sutomo, chairman of Develop Indonesia Foundation, public libraries were available in only 0.5 percent of villages and districts throughout Indonesia.

Worse still, most libraries across the country were neglected or had no new book supply.

"Such a situation has dissuaded people from visiting libraries," Dady said. "A library is indeed a cost center, not a profit center, by its very nature, so it requires a lot of money."

He added that the quality of education in Indonesia was previously more advanced than that in Malaysia, but now it was lagging behind.

"Previously, Malaysians went to Indonesian universities, but now the situation is reversed," he said.

A paper provided by Bebi Sutomo, one of the speakers in the seminar, said that promoting the reading habit was an important factor in education, but it had never been a top priority in the government's national educational policy. Consequently, the country's illiteracy rate was still alarmingly high.

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), in 2000 the illiteracy rate of females and males of 10 years and over in rural areas reached a staggering 40 percent in Papua, 30 percent in West Nusa Tenggara, 30 percent in East Java and 30 percent in South Sulawesi.

Meanwhile, the 1997 International Education Assessment Test indicated that the reading and writing ability of Indonesian elementary school students was only 36 percent, putting Indonesia as second-lowest above Venezuela, which scored 33.9 percent.

In 2001, a UN Development Program (UNDP) report showed that Indonesia's human development index (HDI) -- whose indicators were life expectancy rate, education quality and gross domestic product -- was so low that it plunged the country to 102nd position -- worse than Vietnam -- which ranked 101st.

However, those figures did not prod the government into incorporating the promotion of reading habits into its national programs.

Meanwhile, First Secretary of the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta Zhao Xucai said that his government had come to regard reading promotion as one of the key factors in poverty alleviation in the country.

Since 1995 the Chinese government has introduced the "Prospering Villages through Sciences and Education" project, targeting farmers in rural areas. By 1999, the project had helped to achieve an economic improvement of over 1.5 billion yuan (about US$168 million).