Infrastructure blocked by low land compensation
JAKARTA (JP): Vital infrastructure in Greater Jakarta will remain unrealized as long as inhabitants are not paid enough compensation to give up their land.
Meanwhile, the projects -- worth over US$100 billion -- become more expensive with each year of delay.
Flood control and waste management facilities, for instance, "might never be realized", given the strong resistance to land conversion, a participant of a seminar on Greater Jakarta said yesterday.
Scott Guggenheim, an anthropologist from the World Bank's Jakarta office, was elaborating on the recommendations of the seminar's working group on social aspects.
"But some public enterprises, like state-owned electricity company PLN, are beginning to pay market rates" in land acquisition, therefore preventing unnecessary delay, he said.
Earlier in the seminar, legal expert Koesnadi Hardjasoemantri said the right to be paid market rates is actually inferred to in a 1993 presidential decree on land acquisition for public interest.
The three-day seminar was closed yesterday by Budhy Tjahjati S. Soegijoko from the National Development Planning Coordinating Board. The planning board, together with the World Bank and the Ministry of Public Works, organized the talks on "Strategies for a sustainable Greater Jabotabek (Jakarta, Bogor, Tangerang and Bekasi)".
Other participants of the group on social aspects for sustainable urban growth were health expert and legislator Nafsiah Mboi, anthropologist Parsudi Suparlan, and Adi Sasono of the Center for Information and Development Studies.
Guggenheim said the urgent need to overcome land insecurity was one of the group's main recommendations.
The lack of security among residents, who feel there is no way they can own or live on a plot for an adequate period, leads to strong resistance to land acquisition for public interest.
Public works officials frequently say land appropriation is the major obstacle to the completion of the Banjir Kanal flood control project, which began decades ago.
Another recommendation was decentralization, to enable more empowerment of communities.
The frequent complaint of poor coordination arises because everything here seems to need permission from above, Guggenheim noted.
The government, he said, needs to differentiate its involvement on higher levels and what can be done without it on lower levels.
"A top-down approach was tolerable in the first 20 years of Indonesia's independence," Guggenheim said, but it is no longer efficient. "People don't want to maintain roads that they don't need."
Nafsiah said the paternalism behind such an approach, "or the feeling that `I know better what is good for you'" is worsened, as it is shared by academics as well as officials.
Much simpler regulations was another recommendation, related to the need for better public transportation and transparency in land titles. Bribery is encouraged by confusion of different rules, with a total of 2,000 rules on land issues, Guggenheim said.
Budhy Tjahjati said Greater Jakarta must continue to learn from other experiences of wide community participation such as those of Curitiba in Brazil. (anr)