What makes people poor?

JAKARTA (JP): What makes one poor? There are many factors that lead to poverty, including poor work ethos, lack of skills, and lack of opportunity to improve one's life.

Loekman Soetrisno, a sociologist from Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, said that disparities of economic development are the major source of poverty.

He was referring to the concentration of industrialization in urban areas.

"If we want to alleviate poverty, we must deal with these disparities," he told The Jakarta Post earlier this week.

"We also need to empower the poor," he added.

Those officially listed as "poor" make up 14 percent of the population.

Loekman estimated that 20 percent of the population enjoys 60 percent of the fruits of development.

He believes that the wide gap between the rich and the poor was one of the main factors behind the July 27 riots in Jakarta.

The number of urban poor is apparently increasing in line with the population and the emergence of new urban areas.

The National Development Planning Board predicts that long before the end of the second long-term development plan in 2019, there will be 15 new urban areas with populations of over one million. Four of these new cities will have more than five million inhabitants. By then, around 60 percent of the population will be living in cities.

Unfortunately, urban development can meet the needs of only some of the population. In 1993, only 14.71 percent of urban Indonesian households had clean water, 55.29 percent had electricity, and 2.14 had telecommunication networks.

In the meantime, the growth of the industrial sector in cities and the lack of working fields in rural areas has promoted urban growth. Villagers keep coming to urban areas to try their luck. Many end up as poor urbanites instead.

The government are trying to alleviate poverty through various policies, such as the allocation of funds for under-developed villages, which includes 11 subdistricts in Jakarta.

Under the scheme, which started two years ago, each of the villages was granted Rp 20 million (US$8,492) a year as capital to launch economic activities which could help boost their welfare.

President Soeharto last year issued Presidential Decree No.90/1995 to help alleviate poverty. The decree called on individuals and companies with after-tax incomes or profits of more than Rp 100 million ($42,462) a year to donate up to 2 percent of their earnings to the program.

The Demography Institute of the University of Indonesia is conducting research on poverty. It is also working on projects on unemployment, productivity, child labor, local and international migration and population, all poverty-related. "These problems have not been handled properly by the government," Aris Ananta, head of the institute, said.

He said there is a lack of continuity in the government's efforts to deal with the issues.

Minister of National Development Planning Ginandjar Kartasasmita said recently that the efforts to alleviate poverty were hampered by inefficient use of development funds. Ginandjar, who is also chairman of the National Development Board, identified the lack of congruity and synergy among the agencies involved, a lack of vision, low skills, half-hearted commitment, and red tape as some of the obstacles to development projects.

Juwono Sudarsono, vice governor of the National Resilience Institute, emphasized that the policies to combat poverty should be people-oriented. They should amount to more than words.

"The ideas should be realized concretely to enable the construction of infrastructure and facilities that will allow the poor access to basic needs like clean water, low-cost housing and electricity," he said.

Considering the current situation, Juwono argued that the government needs some time to solve the poverty problems.

"No matter how strong the commitment is, the gap (between the rich and the poor) will remain for at least the next 10 or 15 years," he said.

He was aware that some have suggested a change in the political system in order to narrow economic gaps. Juwono said that he was of the opinion that the political system itself was quite solid. The problem was that "the political system has never been implemented properly".

Loekman said disparities between rich and poor could be narrowed with the lessening of disparities between urban and rural areas.

But he also underlined that the success in the efforts to alleviate poverty had much to do with clean governance.

"The government must be honest and speak out against corruption, nepotism and monopolies" he said.

He warned that more riots might break if the government fails to handle poverty properly. (raw/sim)