Jakarta still can't plug its water leaks

By Soeryo Winoto

JAKARTA (JP): The coming of the rainy season may have eased concerns about water shortages, but questions still linger about when PAM Jaya, the city-owned water company, will finally take action to plug the enormous leakage in its distribution system.

For many years now, the company has been the butt of repeated attacks about the huge waste which is costing the public, particularly water rate payers, billions and billions of rupiahs every year.

It is just as well perhaps that PAM Jaya is currently serving less than 50 percent of all households in Jakarta, which has a total population of nine million people. The majority of Jakartans are still relying on well water for their water supplies, so they are not likely to complain. But with the ground water supply steadily depleting, there is now a greater urgency for PAM to stop, or at least reduce, the leaks and increase its distribution.

This, however, has not been the case.

Each time criticism or a report surfaces, PAM Jaya officials are prepared with their long "explanations" which sound more like defensiveness.

They keep insisting that the problem is caused by technical and administrative faults.

The technical reason is that the leak is caused by the poor conditions of old pipe distribution networks. Many of the pipes were installed during the Dutch colonial times.

The administrative reason is that PAM Jaya lacks professionalism and the company is continually beset by theft.

This has been the explanation given for more than 10 years every time the press came up with screaming headlines about the massive leaks. Nothing has been done to repair the leaks.

In 1988 for example, PAM Jaya admitted that as much as 48 percent of its daily production was lost through leakage.

Sunarjono Danudjo, the then director general of human settlement at the Public Works Ministry, was the first government official who openly criticized PAM Jaya's poor performance.

"PAM Jaya president must be a professional person with managerial and business skills, not a bureaucrat," he once told a hearing with the House of Representatives.

With poor managerial and business knowledge, it was hard for PAM to effectively improve its service to the public, Sunarjono said. Professionalism, he added, included the skill and courage to collect fees from delinquent clients.

He was apparently referring to the fact that some of PAM Jaya's major clients, including top officials and government agencies, are behind in their payments for water usage, and the company has been reluctant to force those payments.

Sunarjono warned that the money used to finance the improvement of PAM water services mostly came from foreign loans.

The loans for water distribution services are arranged by the central government, in this case the Ministry of Public Works, and the water companies are meant to repay the loans from the proceeds of water rate collections.

Some of the problems at PAM Jaya originated from within.

In the rare few cases where the authorities clamped down against water theft in 1988/89, 30 people were arrested, among them officials of PAM Jaya who collaborated in the scam. They were sent to prison.

As far back as 1989, the Jakarta governor at the time, Wiyogo Atmodarminto, urged PAM Jaya to reduce the leakage rate to 40 percent by 1995 and 30 percent by 2005.

Five years hence, the situation has not improved, but rather deteriorated.

A recent disclosure put the leak of PAM Jaya at 56 percent of its total production of some 14,000 liters per second each day.

PAM Jaya president Syamsu Romli however quickly corrected the report and stressed that the leak is currently only 51 percent.

Again he came up with the same explanation that the chief cause is the old pipes. "The 51 percent figure is the official record by the World Bank, while PAM Jaya record is actually only 45.34 percent," Syamsu said.

Susanto Mertodiningrat, head of the drinking water and settlement health improvement training center of the Ministry of Public Works, who disclosed the 56 percent of leakage, said; "If the leaks could be reduced to 40 percent, PAM Jaya could save billions of rupiah and there would be no need for the firm to raise water rates."

Syamsu however insisted that PAM Jaya has made managerial improvements in the last two years, pointing out that revenues jumped to Rp 155.8 billion in 1993 from Rp 107.6 billion in 1991.

And from January to August this year PAM Jaya has collected Rp 129.1 billion from the subscribers.

He said PAM Jaya has increased the number of households who are connected to its distribution network system at a rate of 30,000 annually. PAM Jaya has also uncovered 4,730 cases of violations, saving the company some Rp 3.4 billion.

Still nothing is done to stop the leaks which appear to get worse all the time.

A simple calculation will show that PAM Jaya could actually supply the water needs of some 14 million people.

With a production rate of 14,000 liters a second, and assuming that a person uses 100 liters of water per day, there is no reason why there ought to be a water shortage in Jakarta.

The problem is not in the installation, but in the way PAM Jaya distributes its water. And the leak is the major problem.