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Jakarta is a two-faced city, people say. On one side are the modern office towers and luxury shopping malls; on the other are overcrowded, squalid slums.

No where is this contrast more apparent than in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta. Right next to the Jalan Yos Sudarso overpass is Mal Artha Gading shopping center: attractive and colorful, embellished with giant animal figures.

Next door, separated by just a narrow street, is Pulau Kandang, where the blackened water of the Sunter Canal runs. On land that used to be a swamp stand dozens of houses on wooden stilts, which have to be patched frequently to prevent them from falling into the rancid water below. The ground is covered in human feces and garbage.

“People here think that it’s OK to throw garbage underneath their houses, as the garbage will eventually harden and turn into soil,” said Aduma Lestari, a sanitation engineer with the Tirta Lestari Foundation, a local NGO.

Here, clean water is considered a luxury for residents, who are mostly garbage scavengers living on Rp 20,000 ($2) or less a day, and so are clean toilets, which are communal.

Housewife Nurhayati, 32, her husband and their two young children share a 1.5-square-meter bathroom with three other families, splitting the Rp 100,000 monthly bill.

“The water connection sometimes breaks, so we have to buy it from a vendor for Rp 3,000 a bucket,” Nurhayati said. “Sometimes we ask from a neighbor who has a drilled water well underneath his house. But the quality is so bad that we have to filter it with sand. Still, it’s not drinkable.”

The bathroom itself is said to be connected to a septic tank, which is basically a pit. The waste is not treated or processed at all.
Nurhayati said her children are prone to diarrhea and skin diseases, especially during the flood season. The entire Kelapa Gading area floods annually.

The burden of poor urban sanitation is something Nurhayati shares with millions of other Jakartans, regardless of their economic situation. Experts say that confusion about which government body is in charge, lack of political will and public awareness, as well as budget shortages, have led to a shocking absence of modern and clean public sanitation across the capital.

It shows that the two-sided city analogy is much more than cosmetic. Jakarta may look more modern every day, but its sewage system is still almost nonexistent. Less than 3 percent of the entire city — homes, offices, malls — has a sewage connection, the second-lowest coverage in Southeast Asia after the Laotian capital Vientiane, according to the World Bank. And it is even worse than it sounds: Vientiane’s population is less than 400,000, while Jakarta’s is more than nine million.

The absence of a sewage system has knock-on effects. With dwellings relying on septic tanks that are often little more than traditional pits or gutters, contamination of groundwater is a constant problem.

Some 20 percent of Jakartans do not even have access to a toilet, forcing them to use whatever space they can find, according to the Ministry of Public Works. The ministry’s 2008 data showed that 1.46 million households in the capital dispose of raw sewage into closed gutters, 784,568 dump it into open gutters, while 56,139 households flush their waste directly into the ground or nearby rivers and canals.

Nugroho Tri Utomo, head of the sanitation development technical team at the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas), said 714 tons of human waste go directly into the ground or waterways each day without being processed. “It’s equal to 140 elephants, so go figure,” Nugroho joked darkly.

Makeshift Infrastructure

Jakarta does have a makeshift system of gutters, but unfortunately most are not connected to sewage treatment plants. There’s only one treatment plant in Jakarta, located in Setiabudi, South Jakarta, and waste treatment facilities are only available in Pulo Gebang, East Jakarta, and Duri Kosambi, West Jakarta. The waste from gutters is channeled into the city’s 13 rivers or canals, causing massive pollution.

“Eighty percent of shallow water is polluted with E. coli bacteria, indicating fecal contamination,” Nugroho said.

As a result, he said, illnesses caused by poor sanitation are high, especially among children. Nationwide, children under the age of 5 suffer on average 2.5 cases of diarrhea per year. It inflicts a double whammy on poor families because they lose income from lost work days if they or their children are sick, and they also spend more on health care.

And the sanitation crisis is not confined to Jakarta alone — it is a nationwide problem. According to “Economic Impacts of Sanitation in Southeast Asia,” published in August 2008 by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program, Indonesia loses more than Rp 58 trillion every year, or the equivalent of Rp 265,000 for every man, woman and child, due to lack of sanitation. Health and water resources contribute the most to overall economic losses, as the public is forced to seek medical treatment more often and pay more for access to clean water.

The economic impact from illness alone is $3.3 billion per year. Poor sanitation causes at least 120 million cases of disease and 50,000 premature deaths annually, according to the World Bank report. Diarrhea-related diseases are the most common, with 89 million cases nationwide every year, followed by skin disorders and trachoma, a contagious bacterial conjunctivitis that can lead to blindness.

Poor sanitation also contributes significantly to water pollution, increasing the cost of safe water for households and reducing fish numbers in rivers and lakes. The economic cost of polluted water attributed to poor sanitation is $1.5 billion a year. In addition, the country loses $1.2 billion annually in “welfare losses” — the productive time lost from having to walk to and queue at public toilets.
There is also an estimated loss of $166 million a year in tourism as travelers warn others away from places with poor sanitation. Productive land lost to pollution adds another $96 million in annual losses.

Experts say that other major cities like Bandung, Solo, Denpasar and Medan are in fact ahead of Jakarta because they have begun fixing and expanding their existing sewage systems. They also say the city’s administration has been slow in moving sanitation up from the bottom of its list of priorities.

Fast Growth, Poor Planning

The paucity of sewage connections in Jakarta, experts say, is the result of bad urban planning and fast growth. Sewage systems should be built in the early stages of development, but the only connections in Jakarta are in parts of Kuningan and Sudirman districts.

There have been efforts to develop an underground piped sewage system. In 1991, the Jakarta administration established a city-owned sewage company, PD PAL Jaya. Not long after that, the city, working with the Japanese International Cooperation Agency and World Bank, designed a master plan for the project.

“Nearly two decades have passed but the master plan never came to fruition,” said Setyo Duhkito, head of the program and development division at PD PAL Jaya.

The first problem, he said, is the expense. A single connection costs between $600 and $800 a home, although the price goes down for each additional home hooked up to the system.

A heavily-traveled and densely populated urban area like Jakarta would also require a special pipe jacking system to build sewers in a way that would not disrupt traffic. This system is also expensive, costing between Rp 6 million and Rp 10 million per meter of piping.

Setyo estimated that the total investment needed for a citywide sewer system would come to about Rp 14 trillion — still far less than the nationwide economic losses caused by poor sanitation. “It is indeed a lot of money, but it’s necessary given the impacts on health and the environment,” he said. “However, the Jakarta administration has never made it a priority, thinking that a sanitation project is only an expense that doesn’t generate profits.”

Setyo also pointed to the bureaucratic nightmare in which city agencies overlap on sanitation issues, such as the Health and Public Works departments, and have limited direct contact.

“It’s very difficult to come up with the same vision, like who’s taking care of the funding and who’s in charge of the technical part,” Setyo said. “The bottom line is, the commitment and awareness of the Jakarta administration is seriously lacking.”

Budi Yuwono, director general of housing at the Public Works Ministry, said while other cities were expanding their systems, authorities in Jakarta seemed indifferent and instead focused on other infrastructure projects like roads and public transportation.
“On the other hand, the issue of sanitation should not just be the responsibility of the local government, given the amount of budget needed,” Budi said. “The central government must increase investment in sanitation. At the moment, there is no special budget allocation for sanitation.”

Is There a Solution?

Jakarta, which celebrated its 482nd anniversary last month, cannot afford many more without a citywide sewage system, experts say, and development must start now. If not, it will only become more complicated and expensive.

Bappenas’s Nugroho said that while a comprehensive system was indeed costly to implement, it would cost the city’s residents even more not to have one.

“For every Rp 1 invested, the benefit is Rp 11,” he said. “The failure to overcome the sanitation problem, however, will increase the cost by 36 times.”

First and foremost, the city must adopt new regulations on sanitation, and map out priority areas.

“There is yet to be a good database on water and sanitation, and the mapping is essential before we come to planning and action,” PAL Jaya’s Setyo said. “The master plan must also be more detailed and definitive, stipulating who’s in charge, funding and so on. The existing master plan only deals with technical matters.”

Nugroho said there should also be alternatives to a citywide system, such as a small-scale or communal system for between 100 and 200 households that can be connected to the larger central sewage system.

Community-based sanitation involves the central government, local administration and community sharing costs. Currently, this model is being carried out in Bekasi, just outside of Jakarta, and in other cities.

“We have to make slum areas a priority because they are a high risk for bad sanitation,” Nugroho said.

The city administration must also address the problem of weak law enforcement and poor oversight of housing developments.

“The Jakarta administration should have been stricter with developers. The existing [septic tank] systems in Jakarta must be monitored and fixed,” Nugroho said. “A sewer system must be water resistant, there should be a minimum proximity from water wells and housing, and building developers must be obliged to develop small-scale wastewater processing installations.”

Isabel Blackett, from the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program, said a mixed approach was needed for Jakarta, which means different sewage systems being used to supplement a main piped system.

“At this point, the central government must interfere, given the magnitude of the problem,” Blackett said. “Sanitation should not be seen as a private matter, and you cannot leave it to individuals. Strong political support is needed.”