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Who owns land in new capital city?
Agrarian and Spatial Planning Minister Sofyan Djalil assured that conservation forests would not be disturbed in the relocation, including the 60,000-hectare Bukit Soeharto forest park.
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The area of Bukit Soeharto in East Kalimantan. (Tribun Kaltim/Fachmi Rachman )
A
fter the government confirmed plans to relocate Indonesia’s capital city to East Kalimantan, questions immediately began to immerge surrounding land ownership and the development of a 180,000-hectare compound in North Penajam Paser and Kutai Kartanegara regencies.
The government, which claims to own 90 percent of the land to be developed, has promised to take an incremental approach in the massive undertaking, which President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo described as the first time since independence from colonialism that Indonesia got to decide on its own capital city.
“The 180,000-ha land will be reserved. The first stage, as I mentioned, would be to develop 6,000 ha, and in the next stage, we’ll aim for 40,000 ha,” said Bambang Brodjonegoro, head of the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) said in Bandung, West Java, on Tuesday as quoted by tribunnews.com.
Meanwhile, Agrarian and Spatial Planning Minister Sofyan Djalil assured that conservation forests would not be disturbed in the relocation, including the 60,000-ha Bukit Soeharto forest park.
Although Jokowi has yet to reveal the specific location of the new capital, Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar confirmed that the 180,000 ha of land was located in a production forest area.
In a statement on Tuesday, she stressed that the forests’ permit holders should comply with the changes in regulation, so long as the takeover was in line with prevailing laws.
She added that the government had no obligation to compensate license holders because they only had a permit to manage the area.
