The House of Representatives agreed on Tuesday to endorse a proposed revision to the 2014 Village Law, which seeks to grant village heads more funds and longer terms, as a House initiative, paving the way for what experts deemed a "pork barrel" legislation to be passed into law.

In a plenary session on Tuesday, all nine political parties at the House threw their weight behind the proposed revision without any objections. As House Speaker Puan Maharani of the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) announced the House’ unanimous endorsement, dozens of village heads who gathered inside the plenary hall to witness the meeting burst into roaring cheers and applause.

With the bill now listed as a House initiative, the next step would be for the House and the executive branch to discuss the bill before it could be passed into law.

The revision first gained traction earlier this year, when thousands of village heads gathered in front of the House complex in South Jakarta to demand for a longer tenure and better funding.

Tuesday’s plenary session came just one week after the House Legislation Body (Baleg) concluded its rushed drafting process of the proposed revision and decided to seek endorsement for the bill in a plenary meeting, a first step that is necessary to formally start deliberation on the bill at the House.

But President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo suggested that the government was not in any rush to discuss the bill at the House.

"We will [address the House’s proposed revision to the Village Law] when the time is right,” Jokowi told reporters on the sidelines of his visit to Sumedang, West Java, on Tuesday, a couple of hours before the House plenary session.

Major changes

Lawmakers have said the proposed revision would go a long way in helping to address Indonesia’s long-standing economic divide between less-developed villages and the country’s more densely packed urban areas.

To this end, Baleg has proposed to double the allocation of village funds in the annual regional transfers from the state budget.

Jokowi first introduced the village fund initiative in 2015 to increase economic development throughout the country.

The government allocated Rp 70 trillion (US$4.6 million) to the program this year, which is 8 percent of this year’s Rp 814 trillion budget for regional transfers. But the proposed revision aims to set an annual allocation of 20 percent from the regional transfer funds, allowing each village to receive at least Rp 2 billion annually in village funds.

Another major proposed change is to allow village heads to serve two nine-year terms, as opposed to the current three six-year term arrangement.

While each arrangement means they can be in office for a maximum of 18 years on paper, lawmakers said incumbent village heads could serve in office up to 21 years as part of a transitional period.

This is because in the planned revision, lawmakers want to allow village heads who are currently on their second six-year term to run for a third nine-year term, and extend the tenures of village heads currently on their third six-year term by three years.

Pork-barrel policy

Experts have suspected political motives behind the proposed revision, which, once passed into law, would grant village heads far better working conditions ahead of the general election in February next year and regional elections in November next year.

They said that village heads, which number close to 75,000 nationwide, are an apt political tool for politicians to influence voters living in rural areas, where campaigns and political rallies are sparser.

Critics have also pointed to the fact that, despite not being listed as a priority bill in the House's National Legislation Program (Prolegnas) this year, the proposed revision has seen faster progress when compared with other bills, such as the asset forfeiture bill, which have stalled for years despite repeated calls from the government for them to quickly be passed into law.