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14-year-old student, Virda Yustika, showed off her team's model of a water cycle process on Saturday while explaining it and the effect when the process was disturbed.

 'If we do not plant trees or use water wisely, we will lose our ground water,' she said during an event, entitled Water Care Action, at Cattleya Park in West Jakarta.

She added that the plants guaranteed the water cycle process continued and using water wisely would help to keep water reserves. Virda, an eighth-grader, said that she and her friends from SMPN7 public junior high school in East Jakarta had been trying to save water by doing small things in their homes and at school.

'It's an easy thing, actually. We can save water by turning off the tap when we aren't using it and use water for showers or laundry wisely,' she said, adding that littering in rivers was a big no.

Virda said that understanding the water cycle and the effect when it was disturbed had motivated them to use water wisely. 'Moreover, our school is near a small river that overflows and inundates the surrounding area in the rainy season,' she said.

However, Virda said, many of her schoolmates were not sufficiently aware to save water. 'I think more students will realize the importance of saving water if the school creates more environmental activities like the event today,' she said.

The event, initiated by the Water Resource (SDA) Directorate General of the Public Works Ministry, aimed to encourage the public, especially the young generation, to have more awareness about clean water sustainability.

SDA general director Mohammad Hasan said that besides building supporting facilities for reserving water resources, the awareness of the public to change their lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly was also essential.

'We don't only need to normalize the river but also to 'normalize' the people,' he said during a discussion at the event.

The Jakarta administration is planning to normalize 13 rivers passing through the city and relocate thousands of squatters who live on their banks as part of flood mitigation programs.

Hasan said that normalizing rivers would be useless if people did not stop throwing their trash into them.

'We usually net 40 tons of garbage from Manggarai sluice gate in South Jakarta in one day in the rainy season,' he said.

Hasan said, therefore, the mindset of people who used the river as a giant trash bin should be changed. 'People who live along the river think that it is a trash bin for them to throw garbage and the Sanitary Agency workers will later clean it up at the sluice gate,' he said.

Hasan said he believed that the involvement of environmental communities would help to persuade the public, especially young people, to actively save their environment.

University of Indonesia (UI) sociologist Paulus Wirotomo said the central government and the Jakarta administration should cooperate to not only call on the young generation but instruct them to pay more attention to the environment.

Paulus said both institutions could create, for example, a program that required students from all schools in Jakarta to have a river tour, so the students had a real environmental experience.

'We can create an eco-tourism activity with a boat in the headwaters of Ciliwung River,' he said, adding that the students would experience the beauty of Ciliwung river in the headwaters and how poor its condition was in the city.

Paulus said the tour would also be beneficial for surrounding residents. 'If many people visit the river and the residents could earn some money from it, they would take care of their river,' he said.