The Indonesian government has planned to use private and public investment to give 67.8 percent of the population access to potable water by the end of 2014, Antara news agency reported quoting local media reports on Thursday.
According to the Director of Settlements and Housing at the National Development Planning Agency, Nugroho Tri Utomo, only 53 percent of the population currently had access to potable water, which requires only boiling or filtering before consumption.
Nugroho said that the government was trying to provide popular access to potable water in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
“In 1990, only about 30 percent of the population had access to proper drinking water. According to the MDGs, by 2015, we will have to halve the 70 percent of the population without access,” Nugroho said.
According to Nugroho, this would be difficult. Water quality itself posed a substantial problem, he said.
“We don’t have good sanitation management. Moreover, 80 percent of the rivers in cities have become polluted with garbage [and] feces,” he said, at a discussion about integrated water management in Jakarta.
The agency’s waterways and irrigation director, Donny Azdan, said that the most critical areas for potable water were Java Island and Nusa Tenggara.
“The demand for water is very high, while both the quality and quantity of water are limited. Jakarta, for example, now only has Citarum River, which is polluted, as a clean water source,” Donny said.
Nugroho said the agency planned to boost the number of people who had potable water piped into their homes from 8 percent to 40 percent of the population by 2014.
He said, however, that installing pipes was not the only way to realize the MDG.
“There are many people who obtain water from other sources, such as from wells. We have to improve the quality of the water from those sources, so that we can include this in our MDG calculations,” Nugroho said.
Active participation will lighten the burden of the government which, according to Nugroho, needs Rp 65 trillion (around US$7.5 billion) in investment to meet the MDG targets.
“The government is only able to provide one-fifth of that amount, or about Rp 12 trillion to 13 trillion (US$1.4 billion to US$1.5 billion),” he said.
