Sudaryatmo of the Indonesian Consumers Foundation said Aetra had claimed it would not increase rates, but in fact it was executing a scheme designed to force customers to pay more.

"The *price* adjustments actually disguise the high rates that will be imposed on the affected customers," he told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

He said when conducting surveys of its customers' residences, water companies rarely spoke with their clients, and instead relied on field observations of their residences.

"The crucial step is to involve customers in the *surveys* - encourage them to voluntarily report any developments made to their properties to their operators," he said.

Sudaryatmo recommended the city administration conduct the surveys because private companies sometimes had the propensity to prioritize profit over social concerns.

Firdaus Ali, a hydrology graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the United States, concurred, adding that the city's two private operators - Aetra and PT PAM Lyonnaise Jaya (Palyja) - along with the administration, should lay down comprehensive criteria for determining the adjustments, especially with respect to property allocation, the definition of which is still open to many interpretations.

Firdaus, a board member of the Jakarta Water Supply Regulatory Body, also deemed the one-month notice provided by Aetra for its affected customers to file complaints "too short".

"The operators should give them at least six-month notice as they need time to understand the process of and need consultations for filing complaints," he said.

Wijanto Hadipuro, an economist and hydrologist from Soegijapranata Catholic University in Central Java, said Aetra had the right to implement customer category adjustments as long as they had justifiable scoring systems and defined criteria for assessing property changes.

"The problem is that tariff hikes and adjustments in Jakarta don't reflect improvement in water services, which makes many people angry and unable to accept the unfairness," he said.

Wijanto added that Jakarta should model itself after Semarang, Central Java, in terms of dealing with such adjustments.

The regional state water firm of Semarang, for instance, asked the Consumer Protection and Supervision Foundation to help customers affected by the adjustments or tariff increases by building posts where they could file and process their complaints, he said.

Commenting on the concerns raised by some experts and activists, Aetra's cooperate secretary Yosua L. Tobing said that the adjustments were needed to execute the cross-subsidy tariff system properly.

The system enables the city's upper-middle class customers to pay higher tariffs to fund the water supply for the poor.

"Regarding the 30-day notice, we admit that we have no basis for choosing the time frame but it is part of the incentives to encourage our consumers to file complaints in a timely manner," he said.

PT Aetra Air Jakarta is scheduled to impose massive rate increases in the form of category customer adjustments gradually from June to September this year, affecting around 7,000 surveyed customers under the jurisdictions of its customer service offices in Gudang Air, Balai Pustaka, Duren Sawit, all in East Jakarta.

Early this month, the company circulated notification letters to its 3,000 customers, requiring them to pay higher rates instead of paying a subsidized rate.

Both tap water operators Aetra and Palyja own a number of large water treatment installations, including those in Pejompongan, West Jakarta, and in Buaran and Pulogadung, East Jakarta, where the quality and the quantity of water supply are monitored hourly.

Together, these water treatment plants across the city must provide a constant production capacity of 17,800 liters per second, or equivalent to 1.54 billion liters of water per day, to meet the demand of roughly 800,000 tap water subscribers. (tsy)

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