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s the first semester of this year has nearly ended, the Transportation Ministry'€™s budget realization up to Wednesday has only reached 7 percent, far below its spending target of up to 85 percent of the budget by the end of this year, a senior official says.

'€œOut of the total Rp 65 trillion of the allocated budget, around Rp 45 trillion of the budget is ready to be disbursed. Next week we will gradually disburse the railway infrastructure maintenance and operations (IMO) budget, which will significantly increase our budget disbursement,'€ the ministry'€™s secretary general Santoso Eddy Wibowo told reporters after a hearing with the House of Representatives'€™ Commission V overseeing infrastructure and transportation.

Eddy said that the ministry has allocated Rp 1.7 trillion (US$127.7 million) for IMO and would begin to disburse Rp 300 billion from the budget to train operator PT KAI next week.

'€œWe expected to spend 10 percent of the allocated state budget by the end of this month and 20 percent by July,'€ he said.

In the 2015 revised state budget the ministry allocated most of its budget for the directorate general for sea transportation (Rp 22.8 trillion), followed by the directorate general for railway transportation (18.7 trillion), the directorate general for air transportation (Rp 11.745 trillion) and the directorate general for land transportation (Rp 6 trillion).

Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said that the DIPA (budget execution list) was already completed and there were no more excuses for ministries and institutions to not disburse their budgets immediately.

Bambang said that the Transportation Ministry recorded the slowest budget realization, even slower than the Public Works and Public Housing Ministry, which has had to deal with changes caused by the merging of two ministries.

Budget realization for the Public Works and Public Housing Ministry and Transportation Ministry is crucial to spurring economic growth in the country, as both ministries received the biggest allocation in the revised state budget this year.

As of Wednesday, the Public Works and Public Housing Ministry spent just 12.97 percent of its annual Rp 118 trillion budget, down from 25.98 percent over the same period last year, the ministry'€™s secretary-general Taufik Widjojono said.

'€œThe budget realization this year is slower as compared to last year, as the percentage is only half of what we achieved during the same period last year, but we are optimistic that we can meet the target by the end of this year,'€ Taufik said. State budget disbursement has historically been slow during the first half of the year and then speeds up in the last few months of the year.

During a hearing on Wednesday, Commission V chairman Fary Djemy Francis said that the commission would support the proposal from both ministries to increase their allocations from the 2016 state budget, despite the ministries'€™ slower spending performances this year.