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Activists behind Jakartans’ win over water privatization
Opportunistic: A worker arranges mineral water gallons in Kemanggisan, West Jakarta
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span class="inline inline-center">Opportunistic: A worker arranges mineral water gallons in Kemanggisan, West Jakarta. An absence or unreliable source of tap water has benefited the water gallon business.(JP/PJ Leo)
Jakartans owe dedicated legal activists an unconditional favor for last year’s time consuming court battle to bring the water supply management back to the city administration.
Grouped in the Coalition of Jakarta Residents against Water Privatization (KMMSAJ), the coalition filed a civil lawsuit in 2012 on the conviction that every citizen has the right to equal access to drinking water. Fed up by inadequate access to the water supply, they sued two private companies, the city administration and the central government.
After five years of legal wrangling, their toil paid off late last year when the Supreme Court ruled that tap water should be managed by the public and therefore privatization should be stopped.
The city’s water supply has been managed by two private companies, PT PAM Lyonnaise Jaya (Palyja) and PT Aetra Air Jakarta (Aetra), since 1997. Their contract ends in 2023 when remunicipalization will begin.
“We saw many problems with water distribution,” Arif Maulana, a coalition activist and lawyer, said.
Al Ghiffari Aqsa, another KMMSAJ lawyer, added, “Water privatization also denies people the right to access water.”
Arif and Al Ghiffari worked with the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta), which offers pro bono assistance to the poor and marginalized. Other civil society groups that made up the KMMSAJ were the People’s Coalition for the Rights to Water (Kruha) and Women Solidarity. They all joined forces to represent the people for free.
“Water management cannot be entrusted to private companies. Constitutionally, water is public property and therefore there is no such thing as a water tariff, but rather a service charge,” said Reza of Kruha.
Palyja and Aetra started operations in 1997 after securing a 25-year concession with the commitment of revamping water distribution and extending clean water coverage.
However, nearly two decades after the companies began operations, not much has changed. Water coverage remains low (it now stands at around 60 percent, according to official statistics) and water leakage at 44 percent.
In 2015, the Central Jakarta District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, revoking the 1997 contract granted to Palyja and Aetra and ordered the city administration to stop the business partnership.
In the same year, the private enterprises won an appeal in the Jakarta High Court. In 2016, the coalition filed a cassation with the Supreme Court and triumphed. The court ruled that assigning water management to private operators was unlawful.
“The defendants have breached the law for conferring the rights to manage water to private operators in the form of a contract agreement […] which remains valid until today,” the court stated.
In fact, protests over the 1997 contract agreement have flared up long before the lawsuit was filed, but they fell on deaf ears.
A closer look reveals that the Supreme Court ruling did not explicitly revoke the contract; it only stated that awarding a water management contract to a private company is unlawful. This is providing a loophole for opportunists inside and outside the government to exploit, with the continuation of the disputed partnership being the end game.
The alliance, however, regard it as a momentum to start remunicipalizing water management in the capital. Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno, who used to own part of Aetra, promised that the administration would comply with the ruling.
Interestingly, the verdict came shortly after the Constitutional Court declared the 2004 Water Resource Law, which has been used as a legal basis for water privatization, as unconstitutional. The court asserted that water is a public property that cannot be managed as a commodity.
Water privatization in Indonesia began in 1991 when the World Bank provided a US$92 million loan to PAM Jaya to restore its infrastructure and improve water management. The loan, along with another provided by the Japanese Economic Cooperation Fund, was used to build water infrastructure in Pulogebang, East Jakarta.
The Amrta Institute for Water Literacy, an independent research organization, noted that the World Bank and the fund were the main sponsors of the privatization of clean water management in Jakarta.
