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View all search resultsDoubts linger over new coastal body’s ability to deliver on seawall project
The President has set up a new body to manage the mega seawall project on Java's northern coast, leaving observers wondering about its feasibility and capacity amid a swelling bureacracy and a strained budget.
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A collapsed house, only its frame and roof tiles remaining, leans in a row of abandoned, partially submerged houses on July 30, 2025, in Bedono village, Demak regency, Central Java, where climate change has contributed to a massive loss of coastal land. (AFP/Bay Ismoyo)
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s the northern coast of the world’s most populous island continues to sink steadily, President Prabowo Subianto has moved to realize a decades-old plan to build the so-called Giant Sea Wall on Java by establishing the Java North Coast Management Authority (BOP Pantura).
Yet doubts linger over whether a single body can manage one of the most ambitious construction projects in the country amid concerns that it might only add another bureaucratic layer to the continually expanding Prabowo administration.
The President has advocated for the mega seawall since his tenure as defense minister under his predecessor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. Since taking office in October, he has expanded the plan from a coastal barrier in Jakarta, one of the fastest-sinking cities in the world, into a 500-kilometer megastructure to protect flood-prone communities from Banten to East Java.
Prabowo described the seawall as “vital infrastructure” at an event on June 12 and a day later, included it as a national strategic project in the 2025-2029 National Medium-Term Development Plan (RPJMN).
The project moved a step closer to reality on Monday when the President appointed Deputy Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Didit Herdiawan Ashaf to head BOP Pantura.
Read also: Prabowo asks Jakarta to shell out half of seawall costs
Didit, a former deputy chief of staff of the Indonesian Navy, is to lead the new agency along with two deputies: Darwin Trisna Djajawinata, formerly with state sovereign wealth fund Danantara, and Suhajar Diantoro, a former secretary-general of the Home Ministry.
