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Safe water means development for all Indonesians
The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 11/09/2006 11:50 AM | Opinion
Wahyu Susilo, Jakarta
On Nov. 9, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is expected to issue its 2006 Human Development Report, with the theme Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty, and the Global Water Crisis. This report is always used as a reference for development planning and is one of the indicators of the failure or success of a country in bettering its people's welfare. In this decade, Indonesia has always been in the ""medium human development"" tier, ranked 110th.
Apparently, there will be no significant improvement in Indonesia's rank this year; it might even decline. That became apparent when the number of poor people increased to 17.75 percent of the total population as of March this year, up from 15.97 percent in February 2005.
There are also indications of a slide in Indonesia's quality of life in a report issued on Oct.16 by UNDP, the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. The Millennium Development Goals, 2006 Progress Report in Asia and the Pacific ranks Indonesia among the countries that are most likely to keep the region from attaining the health and welfare targets embodied in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Other countries in this group include Bangladesh, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines.
The failure to make sufficient progress toward the MDGs is due to the small percentage of its gross domestic product Indonesia spends on education and health. Because of this, Indonesia has failed to increase the health of children below the age of five.
There are also indications that Indonesia will fail to increase the proportion of school children who attend first grade and stay in school through the fifth grade of elementary school.
Furthermore, Indonesia is categorized as slow in providing access to clean water and sanitation for low-income families. People's inability to obtain clean water is one of the primary causes of health problems, especially maternal mortality, malnutrition in small children, and the spread of deadly communicable diseases.
The majority of people in Indonesia do not have access to clean water. According to data from the 2002 National Socio-Economic Survey, out of the 29 provinces in Indonesia, only 9 provinces have above-average access to clean water.
What is referred to as clean water in Indonesia is water that can be drunk if it is boiled first. What people need is ""safe water"", which is drinkable without boiling. If we use ""safe water"" as the standard, Indonesia is very far behind.
This reality contradicts the claims of success in the Two Year Performance Report of the Government of SBY-Kalla: Struggling to Re-Build Indonesia, published by the National Planning Agency (Bappenas) last month.
Rather than admitting that human development in Indonesia is lagging far behind that in other developing countries, the government always makes a defensive argument that human development here has improved, but that it has its own indicators that are different from international standards.
This allows multilateral and bilateral donors to push Indonesia to regulate the sources of its water supply. Their real agenda is not to help poor people gain better access to clean water, but to provide legal guarantees to the investors that manage the water sources.
Multilateral and bilateral donors consider private-sector involvement in the management of the water sources an absolute requirement. They succeeded in pushing through the 2004 law concerning the water supply. The Constitution obliges the state to fulfill citizens' economic, social and cultural rights, including to the right to water supplied and managed as public service. But the law pushed that obligation aside.
A study by the People's Coalition for the Right to Obtain Water indicated that the privatization of the Municipal Water Works in Jakarta and Batam had failed to provide better service. In Jakarta, the price of water is increasing, but this is not accompanied by better services and products. In Batam, the industrial sector benefits more from the Municipal Water Works than poor people do.
This crisis could be resolved if the government had the political will to manage the water supply. This government should show a concrete commitment to allocating a significant amount of the budget for the provision and maintenance of water supply infrastructure. If the government simply depends on private investors to provide the infrastructure, no one should expect low-cost, safe water to reach the people.
The writer is the Project Officer of MDGs of INFID (International NGO Forum on Indonesia Development). More Web News
