Indonesia’s Dirty Secret

December 23, 2009

By Elise Potaka

Boer’s agency is working on a local level to try to contain problems, just as a handful of other organisations are doing on different sections of the waterway. But she admits that their efforts on the 270-kilometer river will have little effect without some kind of coordinated approach. Previous efforts, including a project to improve flows by straightening the river, and a flood mitigation scheme on the upper stretches, have had a limited impact; they only moved problems from one area to another.

The Citarum River is one of Indonesia’s key waterways — it supports a population of 28 million people, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and provides water to the country’s capital, Jakarta. It also underpins 20 per cent of Indonesia’s industrial output and five per cent of the country’s rice production. But two decades of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, along with poor enforcement of environmental regulations, is now threatening all this.

Recognising the magnitude of the problems, the Indonesian government is now proposing a new integrated approach. According to Mudjiaji, Director of the government’s Citarum River Bureau, the Integrated Citarum Water Resources Management Investment Program (ICWRMIP) will see a whole range of measures implemented simultaneously. These include a ‘program about conservation, a program about utilisation, a program about disaster management’ as well as community empowerment and education measures. It will be a multi-stakeholder approach, he said.

Mudjiaji put the total amount needed to clean up the Citarum at US$3.3 billion.
In December last year, the ADB approved a $500 million loan under its multi-tranche financing facility. The first tranche of $50 million has been committed to improving the West Tarum Canal on the lower stretches of the Citarum.

Sunardhi Yogantara, who lives 50 metres from the river’s edge, is cautiously positive. ‘I was one who criticised the original plan three years ago,’ he admitted. ‘Then I was more or less involved in the improvement of the plan until they arrived at the current plan, which is very integrated. And I put a lot of hope in it, as one of the affected communities.’

But other activists have attacked the initiative and the ADB loan.

Downstream from Cangkuang, in a riverside town called Bekasi, I met with members of local NGO, elKAIL. We talked beside their stretch of the river. In front of us a man cast a fishing net into the water while shouting across to another man bathing in the flow. By his side, a woman washed clothes and not far away, a farmer called Nilan tended to his crops. ‘It’s prohibited to plant here,’ Nilan told me, ‘but everyone else is doing it and there are no inspections.’

Only 500 metres upstream, the plastic walls of makeshift toilets flapped in the breeze, just a few metres from a row of illegal dwellings. Behind these dwellings, lines of factories crowded the streets.

Ridwan Arifin from elKAIL agreed that urgent action is needed, but he questioned why the government borrowed such a large amount in one hit when the cleanup is scheduled to take 15 years. ‘One big problem is the debt – even when we don’t need loans for certain things we borrow money anyway,’ he said. ‘Why not borrow money in phases, and only if we need it? It just creates a loophole for corruption. These are big complications that the Citarum programs don’t need.’

elKAIL works alongside a group called the Friends of Citarum. Coordinator Dadang Sudadrja told me the project has no anti-corruption measures – a big oversight in a country known for bribe taking and graft.