T

he Jakarta administration is intensifying its efforts to build several water treatment plants in and outside the city in order to help supply clean water to millions of residents, who are currently forced to use contaminated groundwater for their daily consumption.

 Director of city-owned property company PT Jakarta Propertindo (Jakpro), Budi Karya Sumadi, said on Friday that his company had been tasked with building three water treatment plants, in Jembatan Besi and the West Flood Canal in West Jakarta and Buaran in East Jakarta. The work will be costing Rp 300 billion (US$25.8 million).

The water treatment plant in Jembatan Besi is now finalizing its design and selecting a contractor to construct it, with a view to completing the project next year. '€œThe construction will take around eight months, so we aim to have the plant finished in 2015,'€ Budi said.

He added, however, that the construction of the plant at the West Flood Canal would not be conducted in the near future, as it needed special technology to prevent the plant'€™s raw materials from becoming contaminated by hazardous waste. '€œWe need to adopt special technology that can protect the area from seawater flooding,'€ he said.

He added that the plant to be constructed in Buaran needed a further study.

Budi said he could not reveal the capacity of the three plants as that greatly depended on the supply of raw materials.

Jakpro has recently completed the construction of a small water treatment plant at Pluit Reservoir in North Jakarta, which has a total capacity of 2,500 cubic meters per day.

'€œWe supply the water directly to Pluit residents,'€ he said, adding that hundreds of thousands of low-income people in the area partly used groundwater and partly bought clean water for their daily needs.

Two companies '€“ PT PAM Lyonnaise Jaya (Palyja) and PT Aetra Air Jakarta '€“ which supply clean water to residents in Jakarta, claimed that they also lacked clean water supplies.

Only 60 percent of the city'€™s residents can access piped clean water. The remaining 40 percent relies on groundwater. The over-exploitation of groundwater has also caused land subsidence, especially in North and Central Jakarta.

According to the Amrta Institute for Water Literacy, an NGO that aims to raise public awareness over water-related issues, the administration had only monitored 8 percent of the use of groundwater.

The city suffers a potential loss of groundwater tax of between Rp 800 billion ($65.50 million) and Rp 1.4 trillion annually for the unrecorded use of groundwater.

Besides the water treatment plants that will be constructed by Jakpro, the city will also be building a pipeline connecting Jatiluhur Dam in Purwakarta, West Java, to a water treatment plant in Bekasi, also in West Java, which will be supplied to the capital city.

The project is estimated to cost Rp 3 trillion and it will be financed by the Public Works Ministry, while city-owned water operator PT PAM Jaya, which is tasked with installing pipes from the water treatment plant in Bekasi to Kapuk Muara in North Jakarta, has begun to draw up the plant'€™s detailed engineering design (DED).

 '€œWe aim to have the DED of the 32-kilometer pipe completed by the end of August,'€ said PAM Jaya president director Sri Kaderi.

Sri said he hoped the bidding for the pipe installation project, which is worth Rp 2.7 trillion ($231 million), would be conducted by the end of this year. '€œSo, when the water treatment facility is complete, we will also be ready to channel the water,'€ he said.

According to PAM Jaya, the clean water pipe installation covered 80 percent of the Greater Jakarta area, but only 61 percent of pipe network was used by customers.