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o child wants to be homeless and working on the streets. However, fate often intervenes, leaving them with no other choice to survive in the capital.

It is just over two years since 9-year-old Lazuardi gave up formal education and started singing on public transportation. Since his father abandoned him, his mother and younger brother in 2014, the boy said his mother had asked him to work as a street performer to support his family.

With a plastic water bottle filled with rice, a “musical instrument” made by his mother, Lazuardi and his friend perform for bus passengers every day from morning to evening. “This job isn’t that bad and I have a lot of friends too, however I still want to go back to school someday,” Lazuardi told The Jakarta Post recently on a bridge in Plumpang, North Jakarta, where he waits every day for Metro Minis to pass by.

Less than 50 meters from the bridge, Lazuardi’s mother sits as she keeps an eye on the street, making sure that her oldest son is safe from any danger or from being picked up by city officials.

One day Lazuardi and his friends were arrested by, Jakarta Social Agency personnel who patrol the area to round up child street performers and beggars. He was held for four days until his mother paid Rp 600,000 (US$45.5) to a man claiming to be able to release him.

“I don’t understand, even though my voice isn’t great, I did nothing bad,” he said, adding that since then he always hid under the bridge every time he saw a patrol car.

Street children can be seen at almost every traffic intersection throughout the city. Most of them earn a living by working as street performers, beggars, or worse, being sedated by adults who use them for begging.

A similar situation can also be found in other parts of Greater Jakarta. “It isn’t for me,” said 11-year-old Natalina, after descending with dozens of other child beggars on a street-dining area in Cinere, Depok, West Java. “I give everything I get to my mom and then she gives me some of it as pocket money,” she said while pointing to a shabbily dressed woman sitting nearby.

She said she could earn up to Rp 100,000 every night. “It used to be more than this, but now there are a lot of other children here as well”.

In 2013 Jakarta Social Agency recorded that there were approximately 7,300 street children in the capital, some of whom came from other cities. However, despite the large number, the city administration has still found no answer to the social problem.

A recent child exploitation case has exposed the vulnerability of street children.

Last week, South Jakarta Police arrested four suspects on charges of child exploitation along with 20 children, one of whom was a 6-month-old baby who was found to have been sedated by the suspects.

The suspects reportedly forced the children to work as beggars and street singers. Two of them admitted that they were the parents of the baby who was given a high dose of the sedative Clonazepam.

Separately, Arum Ratnawati, national chief technical advisor of the International Labor Organization (ILO) said the most effective way to reduce the number of street children was by raising living standards in Indonesia.

The root of the problem, she said, was there were still large numbers of people living in poverty and they forced their children to help make ends meet on the street. “Another problem is law enforcement. We already have a law protecting children from working on the street, but the implementation needs to be improved,” she continued.

In 2009 a report released by the ILO showed that of the total 58.8 million children in Indonesia aged 5-17 years, approximately 4.05 million, 6.9 percent, were working. In 2014 the organization and the Manpower Ministry drafted the “Road Map Toward Child Labor Free Indonesia in 2022”.

“We are still on the right track as the number of child workers is decreasing, but the most effective way is by reducing poverty levels,” she said.

— JP/Indra Budiari