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Kalimantan, soon to be home for new capital city
The two-year study by the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) on the planned relocation of the national capital from Jakarta to a yet-to-be-determined city has come up with the penultimate decision — that the new capital is to be established in one of the carefully examined territories in Kalimantan
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span>The two-year study by the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) on the planned relocation of the national capital from Jakarta to a yet-to-be-determined city has come up with the penultimate decision — that the new capital is to be established in one of the carefully examined territories in Kalimantan.
National Development Planning Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro recently revealed that the Bappenas team tasked to study the capital relocation had recommended three provinces in Kalimantan — South, Central and East Kalimantan — that fit all the requirements set. The decision was made after eliminating the current capital city of Jakarta, territories close to Jakarta and other provinces from the list of potential sites.
“The eventual location for the new capital city will be announced by the end of this year,” Bambang told The Jakarta Post in an exclusive interview on Thursday.
The team is to concentrate on completing all the necessary administrative, legal and physical preparations throughout next year, particularly the drafting of a masterplan, as well as site acquisition and physical preparations for the basic infrastructure of the new capital city before starting construction in 2021.
Indonesia is prone to earthquakes, which are often followed by tsunami, because Indonesia is at the meeting point of three major continental plates — the Pacific, the Eurasian and the Indo-Australian — and the much smaller Philippine plate, which often shift. Indonesia is also on the “Ring of Fire”, a horseshoe-shaped area around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, from Australia to the Andes, along which 90 percent of all volcanic earthquakes occur.
Kalimantan is one of the few regions that are relatively free from earthquakes. It is the apparent reason, besides the availability of a large amount of territory, behind the choice on Kalimantan as the site for the new capital city. Another fundamental reason is Kalimantan’s position, which is at the geographical center of country.
Selecting which one of the three Kalimantan provinces, or to be precise which territory in the eventually selected province, that would be the eventual site of the new capital city would likely be much easier than the initial phase of the study that had come out with the bold recommendation and decision to discard the option of maintaining Jakarta as the capital or choosing a territory close to Jakarta as a replacement.
In practice, however, the team’s next task of picking the eventual province, or the eventual territory, that will next house the country’s capital would not be less easy than the previous one.
Kalimantan, including the three nominated provinces, has indeed avoided earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but there are some pressing issues that the team needs to thoroughly consider prior to making the final recommendation and decision. The island’s vast tropical forests have continued to be burned to make way for plantations, activities that often trigger wildfires and subsequently produce and export smoky haze — a frequently contentious issue with our neighboring countries.
Meanwhile, extractive industries have caused the deaths of hundreds who fall into abandoned pits, while other forms of environmental degradation have raised more doubts about the restoration of damaged areas to allow for the development of a functional new capital.
Annual data from Statistics Indonesia (BPS) and the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) are statistical evidence of incidents such as forest fires and smoky haze, as well as flooding and landslides in Kalimantan.
Other than those disasters, infrastructure and connectivity, particularly access to remote regions in provinces in Kalimantan, are still a problem. Land, air and water transportation are indeed available in the province, but they are still insufficient to connect all the regions in Kalimantan.
The eventual choice of Kalimantan would therefore require greater development investment in order to meet all the requirements needed to establish an ideal new capital city. Infrastructure development would therefore be costly as roads and rail networks struggle to link villages, cities and regencies in the eventually selected province that would host it.
As Bambang has revealed, the government would roughly need Rp 466 trillion (about US$33 billion) to build the new capital, not to mention resettle workers and their families from Jakarta.
– The Jakarta Post’s Library and Information Center contributed data for this article
