The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Nearly all of Indonesia's 220 million citizens lack access to proper sanitation, an official at the Public Works Ministry said Tuesday.
The director general for Housing, Building and Planning, Budi Yuwono, said 76.15 percent of the total population already had access to basic sanitation, such as toilets, but only 2.21 percent had access to proper sanitation with sewage and wastewater treatment.
"Compared to other Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia ranks sixth in terms of sanitation services, with only 69 percent of the urban population and 46 percent of the rural population receiving adequate services," Yuwono told a discussion organized by USAID's Environmental Services Program (ESP).
He quoted 2005 data from the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) that ranked Indonesia below Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Myanmar, and above only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in sanitation infrastructure.
Bappenas director for Settlement and Housing Budi Hidayat said Indonesia produced 6.4 million tons of human waste per year, and around 30 percent of it was neither collected well nor processed.
ESP reported that in urban areas, 35 percent of toilets channeled human waste directly into rivers instead of into septic tanks, while 70 percent of groundwater had been contaminated with fecal bacteria.
The poor sanitation, said Hidayat, caused potential economic losses of US$6.34 million and led to the deaths of 100,000 children under the age of five every year.
Tjatur Saptoedy, a member of the House of Representatives' Commission VII on environmental affairs, said such conditions were a result of the government's lack of commitment to improving sanitation infrastructure.
"The sanitation sector received only Rp 500 billion (US$52.88 million) of the total Rp 36.1 trillion the government allocated for infrastructure development in 2008," he said.
He said the government allocated around Rp 7.7 trillion for the sanitation sector over the past 30 years, a number that worked out to Rp 200 per citizen per year. The minimal budget needed to provide adequate sanitation facilities, he said, is Rp 47,000 per head per year.
Yuwono said providing proper sanitation was not only the central government's responsibility, but that local administrations, too, played important roles.
However, he said the regions' commitments to improving sanitation in their areas was even poorer, with most allocating less than 2 percent of regional budgets to the sector.
"Some regions, like Surakarta (Central Java), Bontang (East Kalimantan) and Pontianak (West Kalimantan), are very committed to improving their sanitation, but others need continuous urging," said Yuwono.
Erna Witoelar, former UN Millennium Development Goals Ambassador to Indonesia, said efforts to improve the country's sanitation conditions should also involve communities, whose negligence had worsened problems.
"Communities must continuously urge the government to improve sanitation, besides taking part in improvement efforts themselves," she said.
Tjatur added that "large-scale efforts are needed to build awareness in communities".
Indonesia is not the only country facing sanitation problems. The UN Development Program's 2006 Human Development Report revealed that almost half the people living in developing countries lack access to proper sanitation.
The UN has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. (wda)
