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espite funding shortages, a new law obliges government institutions to use a single source for geographical mapping as its policy reference.

National Coordinating Agency for Land Survey and Mapping (Bakosurtanal) head Asep Karsidi said the 2011 Geo-spatial Information Law stipulated that government institutions should refer to Bakosurtanal for official geographical information.

According to Asep, Bakosurtanal had made 306 basic maps of Indonesian geography, scaled 1:250,000.

The maps cover coastlines, rivers, roads, natural contours, cities and regions, mountains, borders of administrations and land coverage.

“They must be the single reference for government departments that make specialized maps for what they are handling. For example, the Forestry Ministry made a map of forest fires in Indonesia,” he said on Tuesday.

He underscored the importance of a single reference because many institutions currently neglected it, he said.

“Some institutions base their specialized maps on American-made maps. This is unacceptable, because Bakosurtanal is the singular reference in Indonesia,” he said.

Additionally, once a department completed a specialized map, their map could not be overlaid with the basic map because the basic map was not produced by Bakosurtanal.

“The results would be poorly integrated. The country’s basic map from Bakosurtanal is the most accurate. A specialized map should refer to us,” Asep added.

However, he did acknowledge that the country’s basic map was already out of date, as the latest basic map available was from 2000 due to a lack of government funding.

“From 2010 to 2014, we only accepted an allocation of Rp 1.4 trillion [US$163.6 million],” he said.

Besides Indonesia’s basic map, Bakosurtanal also made basic maps scaled 1:50,000 for big islands outside Java and a basic map scaled 1: 25,000 for Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara.

Asep said that Bakosurtanal managed to a find solution through the annual coordination meeting with the government departments on land surveying and mapping.

The meeting outlined the specialized maps the departments would like to make for the next year.

“Through the meeting, we can synchronize by updating maps of places where specialized maps are being made. It’s a sort of efficiency,” he said.

As of today, Indonesia still lacks a bathymetric chart that shows sea floor depths.

“We also are collaborating with the National Disaster Management Agency to make maps of disaster-prone regions including Aceh and Bengkulu,” he said.

Hasanudin Z. Abidin, head of the geodesy research division at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), said that the government should also think about geodesy education at universities in the future.

“There are still so few universities that have geodesy departments. Even among vocational schools, we only have one in Sukabumi, West Java,” he said. (fem)