T

he government and the House of Representatives are mulling creating a legislation on population growth control to gear up efforts to revitalize the country’s long-stalled family planning program, a senior family planning official says.

Sugiri Syarief, the head of Na-tional Demography and Family Planning Agency (BKKBN), said on Monday that despite achievements during the last three years, rapid population growth remained a problem in Indonesia partly due to prolonged neglect of the family planning program in regions and at the local level.

If the law were established, he said, local governments would hopefully be far more committed to controlling the currently high rate of population growth in the country.

“I’m sure it will greatly affect the implementation of our family planning program, providing us with a breakthrough to revitalize this long-stagnated movement,” Sugiri told journalists after attending a hearing with Commission IX overseeing health, labor and social affairs at the House of Representatives.

Part of the problem is that regional governments do not prioritize family planning programs.

He said that the new bill would provide regional governments with a set of guidelines for implementing a credible family planning program.

However, he said, it could take a long time for the bill to be passed into law.

“It may take three years. We will first develop an academic paper on the draft law,” he added.

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), Indonesia’s population reached 237.6 million in 2010; an increase of 32.5 million people since 2000, which gives an average annual population growth rate over the past 10 years of 1.49 percent.

To cope with this high rate, the BKKBN is targeting to increase the country’s contraceptive rate (CPR) to 72 percent in 2014 from the current 61.4 percent in 2011. Sugiri said that the establishment of the 2009 Law on Population and Family Development had authorized the decentralization of family planning programs in the country.

Many local government heads, he said, had paid too little attention to family planning programs in their regions.

Sonny Harry B. Harmadhi, head of the Institute of Demography at the University of Indonesia’s School of Economics, said that establishing a law on population growth control was not a proper solution to deal with Indonesia’s ongoing population explosion.

“I really agree that we must revitalize the national family planning movement. Instead of establishing a law on population growth control, however, it is much more important for us to educate people on the importance of family planning,” he told The Jakarta Post.

Instead of imposing tougher regulations on population growth control, he said, the government should create more awareness about family planning at the local level. “I’m worried that such a law would only create unnecessary pressures on local governments,” he said.

Subagyo Partodiharjo, a member of Commission IX and the Democratic Party faction, said that it was important not only to teach birth control, but also to limit the number of children people could have.

“Childbirth control and limitation are totally different. By controlling childbirth, we may still have a lot of children although with a far greater distance between births.

“But by limiting the number of children in our family, we will have a smaller family, which is important for the sake of our prosperity,” he said.