oordinating Human Development and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy said the government would improve data collection and update the Integrated Data for Social Welfare (DTKS) -- a database of poor and vulnerable families -- next year amid a rising poverty rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The DTKS, managed by the Social Affairs Ministry, which is under Muhadjir's jurisdiction, collects socioeconomic and demographic information on the population's bottom 40 percent in terms of welfare. It was built upon a 2015 Statistics Indonesia (BPS) survey and has been used as the first reference for distributing social aid, although outdated data has been widely blamed for mistargeted aid disbursement.
"The government aims to update the DTKS on a large scale in 2021," Muhadjir said in a written statement on Monday as reported by tempo.co.
The plan will involve not only the Social Affairs Ministry, but all state institutions under Muhadjir's office, as well as local administrations, which have been mainly responsible for updating the database since 2016.
"The regional administrations' active involvement is also very vital," Muhadjir said.
The National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) recently revealed that only 113 of the country’s 514 municipalities and regencies had updated their data on the DKTS database. The regions with updated data were predominantly located on the island of Java, as well as the Bangka Belitung islands and Nusa Tenggara.
DKTS data discrepancies had caused slow disbursement of the government's social assistance programs in the early days of the pandemic. Even up to November, the government had only spent 62.1 percent of this year's Rp 695.2 trillion COVID-19 stimulus budget.
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