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View all search resultsAccommodating the dead: Jakarta faces grave shortage crisis
The Jakarta parks agency puts the remaining number of available graves at just 118,000, while over 86 percent of public cemeteries are at full capacity and the remainder are at 80 percent capacity, leaving the city's dead in dire need of a final resting place.
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A groundskeeper tidies a grave on Oct. 21, 2025, at the South Grogol Public Cemetery (TPU) in South Jakarta. Nine TPU in the municipality are at full capacity and have started turning to stacked burials to accommodate demand. (Antara/Naufal Khoirulloh)
J
akarta is grappling with a shortage of burial land as its cemeteries have either reached or exceeded capacity, sparking concerns over increased commercialization of resting places for the city’s dead.
At least 69 of the capital’s 80 public cemeteries (TPU), or a whopping 86.25 percent, are full, while some of the remaining 11 cemeteries are at over 80 percent capacity, according to the Jakarta Parks and Forestry Agency. This leaves only 118,000 graves and many fearing that the available plots will dwindle quickly in the coming years.
Many residents, especially those from low- and middle-income groups, depend on free burial plots at public cemeteries to bury their loved ones in Jakarta, where land is increasingly scarce and costly.
Following rapid growth in its population over the past few years, the Jakarta provincial administration has built new public cemeteries as well as expanded the capacity of existing TPU. The latter includes stacked burials, or the practice of burying more than one casket atop others in a single vertical plot.
A 2007 bylaw on cemeteries allows the use of a single grave for burying the remains of more than one person, typically from the same family. The original plot must be at least three years old before another body can be added to the grave, and the maximum depth of the topmost casket must be 1 meter belowground.
Even so, the gap between available space and demand remains large, and many cemeteries have been forced to stop offering new plots due to insufficient land.
Read also: Crammed Jakarta pushes the dead to share space
