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Autonomy Watch: Govt asked to return Citarum management to region

The government has been urged to provide more room to the West Java provincial administration and local people to get involved in the management of the Citarum River in order to protect it from further degradation

Yuli Tri Suwarni (The Jakarta Post)
Bandung
Mon, July 11, 2011

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Autonomy Watch: Govt asked to return Citarum management to region

T

he government has been urged to provide more room to the West Java provincial administration and local people to get involved in the management of the Citarum River in order to protect it from further degradation.

“The central government has to consider local knowledge. The regional administration knows the problem better,” environmentalist Eka Santosa recently said in Bandung.

Eka chairs the West Java DAS, or river basin, forum, an institution under the Forestry Ministry, which held a discussion last week on what they called chaotic management of the river basin.

He called on the central government to review its policies on Citarum, which he said tended to be centrist and counterproductive to the green campaign for the river.

He said that Citarum had attracted the world’s attention for negative reasons — being the dirtiest river in the world, causing extensive environmental damage by serious pollution.

“This has created a negative image of the nation over management of the river,” he said.

He suggested the government revert to local knowledge by involving some 12 million people in the 11 municipalities and regencies in West Java located along the river basin to participate as subjects, but not
as objects.

Data at the Dewan Pelestari Lingkungan Kehutanan Tatar Sunda, an environmental NGO in Bandung, shows that there have been 13 institutions from different ministries and other government agencies involved in the river management since the 1980s.

The Citarum River originates from the southeastern part of Mount Wayang, Pangalengan, Bandung regency, some 60 kilometers to the south of the provincial capital. It has seven sub-DAS and 15 tributaries, with a total length of 277 kilometers.

The river has become a source of power under the Java-Bali distribution network, as well as clean water for some 70 percent of the Greater Jakarta population.

It has at least 58 regulations on the DAS upper stream, comprising laws, government regulations, presidential decrees, regional bylaws and six West Java governor decrees.

Environmental activists have been skeptical about the government’s project, which began in 1994 and finished in 2007, funded by billions of dollars of overseas loans.

The ¥7.8 billion normalization project was reported to have dredged some two million cubic meters of sediments from the river, but could not answer the problem of recurrent floods due to damage to the river’s upper stream area.

Another project worth US$870 million was launched in 2010, aiming to normalize the river with work expected to be completed in 2017.

Citarum DAS forum chairman Nana Sutisna said all parties must agree to allow more room for the community in upper stream areas and downstream regions for them to also help protect and nurture their sense of belonging to the river.

“We have to return the sovereignty of Citarum to the region. Don’t put it under the authority of the central government. We have to learn how communities in other countries have been successful in dealing with serious damage to rivers in only 4.5 year,” Nana said.

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