•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

Nurima’s days of lugging water are over. Ever since the 49-year-old housewife moved to the North Jakarta slum of Utan Jati in 1980, she’s faced the daily headache of going out with jerry cans to buy clean water from the local water truck for cooking, drinking and bathing her five children.

Those who couldn’t afford to buy water from the syndicate of vendors — who charge 20 to 40 times more than what rich Jakartans pay for piped water — used foul river water to wash their clothes or clean their houses, or begged for well water from neighbors. But for drinking water, they had no choice but to buy from the vendors.

Even after PT Palyja, one of the city’s two private water companies, installed a giant distribution tank nearby a few years ago, Nurima, who likes to wear brightly-colored jilbabs and even brighter red lipstick, still needed a pushcart to get her jerry cans back home.

Now, however, she and her neighbors need only walk over to the wall of their ramshackle homes and turn a knob. Since March, piped water has come to Utan Jati.

“It’s so much cheaper,” Nurima said, looking down at the shiny new water meter in her front yard, made possible through a grant program run by the World Bank and Palyja. “It makes everything easier, and the water is cleaner.”

Cheaper, yes, but really clean? Not exactly.

A Grim and Dirty Journey

The journey that ends in the buckets that Nurima puts under her water spigot begins about 85 kilometers to the southeast, in the foothills of West Java and the Jati Luhur reservoir and its two billion square meters of reasonably clean water.

By the time it reaches North Jakarta, as well as the fashionable homes of Central and South Jakarta, the water is not potable.

The water gets increasingly filthy as it travels down a 68-kilometer canal filled with trash and human feces and into water treatment plants in the city, where it’s purified and becomes drinkable again. But once it goes into the city’s 5,500-kilometers of leaky underground pipes, the water can be contaminated by sewage, solid waste and salt water, making it undrinkable.

“Jakarta is facing urbanization that is straining its infrastructure. It is straining it beyond belief,” said Hongjoo Hahm, lead infrastructure specialist at the World Bank in Jakarta. “Jakarta has to learn to live with water.”

No argument there. City dwellers can survive floods and build giant walls to block tides from the Java Sea from inundating their homes, but they cannot survive unless they have clean water to drink. Jati Luhur reservoir is literally Jakarta’s lifeline, supplying up to 60 percent of its water needs, but problems with its long-term quality and consistent flow keep water experts up at night.

Water from the reservoir reaches Jakarta though the West Tarum Canal. However, it enters the canal via the Citarum River, Java’s largest and most polluted waterway. The garbage and raw sewage of millions of people, as well as waste from factories, is dumped into the Citarum, and as some of the river is diverted into the West Tarum, its toxins follow.

Floating islands of waste block the canal’s flow by up to 90 percent in some areas. Some canal water is also diverted for irrigation, meaning that polluted water is used to grow crops.

Then there are the human settlements, both legal and illegal, along the canal itself. The homes, restaurants, mini-factories and brothels all use the canal as a toilet, shower, trash can, even burial site. On a recent visit, a Jakarta Globe reporter saw a headless chicken flow down the canal and disappear.

Frighteningly, 25 percent to 30 percent of water going into the city’s plants doesn’t meet official health and quality standards for untreated water. “The feeling among the people who live along the river is that the river is their backyard,” said Budhi Santoso, a senior staffer at the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas). He jokingly noted the “helicopter” problem along the West Tarum — a nickname for the makeshift wooden toilets hanging over the banks of the canal.

Bappenas and the Asian Development Bank are set to begin a long-term — $3.5 billion over 15 to 20 years — integrated rehabilitation program in the Citarum River Basin. This will involve cleaning and repairing the banks of the river and canal, relocating thousands of illegal squatters and launching a massive antipollution education program for local communities.

“The story of the Citarum is linked to the story of Jakarta,” Budhi said. “If we have a good supply of raw water, it will improve water quality and quantity.”

There’s talk that the project, scheduled to begin this year with an initial infusion of $50 million in funding, will be a model for both the country and Southeast Asia.

Another proposal is a 70-kilometer closed pipeline to deliver water from Jati Luhur, which would keep out contaminants but cost $187 million.

Avoiding Hard Questions

Infrastructure analysts say that government officials, after avoiding Jakarta’s water problems for years, are now gung-ho about projects at all levels. The reason, they say a bit cynically, is because Indonesia now has a system of direct elections and politicians have to answer to voters.

Whatever the motivation, their timing is perfect. In April, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo signed an order for a six- to 16-fold increase in tariffs on groundwater extraction by factories, hotels, offices, shopping malls and large homes.

The move, to make the tariffs equal to the price of piped water, is a first step in a multiyear process of weaning the city off of groundwater, the overuse of which has caused some parts of Jakarta to subside by as much as 25 centimeters a year. The World Bank warns that North Jakarta could be overrun by sea tides by 2018 if nothing is done.

“In 1994, the World Bank said, ‘Stop the groundwater extraction.’ [The city administration] didn’t listen,” Hahm said. “The message hasn’t changed in 15 years.”

Aside from the “sinking city” problem, some of the city’s freshwater aquifers have been unable to replenish themselves fast enough because of excessive groundwater extraction. As a result, some city residents complain of seawater seeping into their wells.
Nani, a 33-year-old housewife who lives in North Jakarta, recalled peeling soap off her children’s skin during bath time due to the high level of salt in the well water. Now her house has piped water.

“For cleaning, we even used groundwater,” she said, “even though we knew it was salty.”

Government officials and water experts say that Jati Luhur, with the present state of its delivery system, could not meet all of Jakarta’s water needs if all groundwater extraction came to a sudden halt. Shockingly, only about 60 percent of Jakarta homes are hooked up to piped water, and as many as 30 percent rely solely on groundwater. The rest are dependent on water truck operators.

An immediate total ban on groundwater extraction could cause chaos due to water shortages, but that is hardly worth worrying about since a ban would be impossible to enforce unless special teams went door-to-door demanding that residents shut down their wells.

“We cannot do it suddenly, it must be done gradually,” said Iwan Nursyirwan, director general for water resources at the Ministry of Public Works.

Even with a grace period of several years, the city would still need additional sources of surface water for household demand. The central government is currently negotiating a loan from South Korea to build a new reservoir in Karian, West Java, to service Jakarta.

Private Sector Solutions

Bappenas is also promoting private- sector infrastructure, noting that there are currently 25 water-related projects worth a total of $775 million in various stages. The board’s aim is to get private companies to build and operate new reservoirs and water delivery systems and sell water in bulk to local governments.

“Our recent calculations show that we lack infrastructure development and will not reach our [United Nations] Millennium Development Goals by 2015 unless we double investment,” said Bastary Pandji Indra, director of Bappenas’s public-private partnership program.

He noted that in the 1980s, during the Suharto era, the nation spent 5.5 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure development, but only 2.2 percent over the past five years. Malaysia spends 7 percent, by comparison, and Vietnam 4 percent.

“Electricity is a priority, but so is water,” Bastary said. “In Jakarta, Bandung, Bali, we will face a water crisis in the next five years.”

There’s no shortage of skeptics about public-private partnerships for water infrastructure. Some say that the idea is upside-down, that the private sector shouldn’t be selling water to the government. Others say that Indonesia would be hard-pressed to find companies willing to invest $100 million to build a reservoir unless they had the sole authority to set bulk water tariffs, which is obviously a touchy issue.

“You can’t get the private sector to put money in until they have security of contract and they can get a reasonable rate of return on their investment,” said Scott Younger, president commissioner of Glendale Partners, a Jakarta-based project development and consulting firm.

He said that the city also needed to think more creatively about water sources, including rainwater.

Aart van Nes, a civil engineer who consults for the city administration on water issues, noted that about half of the water from Jakarta’s treatment plants doesn’t even get to customers because of leaks in the distribution system and illegal hookups.

Getting the Hookup

Jakarta’s water supply is directly linked to the ability of the city’s two privately run water providers, Palyja and PT Aetra Air Jakarta, to hook up more homes to piped water.

“To expand coverage, you need additional water. Even if you halt illegal connections and leakage, it’s not enough,” said Philippe Folliasson, president director of Palyja.

Since the city signed contracts with the two water providers in 1997, connections to Jakarta’s piped water network have nearly doubled to around 800,000. But the expansion effort is in danger of faltering because the city hasn’t approved an increase in water tariffs in two and a half years.

Supporters of tariff increases — who appear to be in the majority both in and outside the government — note that the city’s poor who don’t have piped water pay 20 times more than the current tariff rate to water truck gangs, and inflation alone dictates that rates must be increased.

“The only way forward is to expand the network, increase connections and make sure everyone has access to piped water,” Folliasson said. “Raising tariffs — that’s the only solution.”

Indonesia is not the only country to face this quandary, experts say. Globally, the poor pay far more for water because they must get it through informal sources. But they also say that Indonesian politicians, specifically the Jakarta City Council, are more worried about a backlash from middle-class and high-income voters if their home water bills go up.

“These politicians somehow believe that water should be free. … They have this skewed notion that they are doing a public service by keeping water prices artificially low,” Bastary said. “But all they’re doing is preventing poor people from getting access to piped water.”

Ahmad Lanti, the founding commissioner of Jakarta’s water regulatory body, said, “This is a very difficult puzzle. If you want to raise the tariff on poor people to create equilibrium with rich people, there will be social unrest — even though they are paying more for vendor water. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Fortunately, more and more slum dwellers are escaping. Water connections and meters subsidized by the Palyja-World Bank scheme are also being installed in Muara Baru, North Jakarta, arguably the city’s poorest area, despite threats of violence from local water vendors.

Back in Utan Jati, Sriyati, 37, proudly shows her June water bill of Rp 20,000 ($2), about half what she used to give to vendors. But it will take time for her to get used to the power of being a paying customer.

“Last week there was a problem, and we didn’t have any water for a day,” she said. “We just waited.”

When told that she had the right to call customer service to complain, she seemed stunned. Then she smiled at the thought.