Solutions to Jakarta's water woes hang in the balance

The Straits Times, February 24, 2007
By John McBeth, Senior Writer



JAKARTA - SOME of the worst floods in memory have finally receded, leaving Jakarta's administrators to count the cost in lives and damage and everyone else to point a finger at who should be held responsible. Time, then, to also ponder another crisis facing the Indonesian capital - the water shortage.

The two are so closely related - and the solution to both so elementary - that it raises questions over why the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and successive central and local governments have never managed to arrive at a holistic approach to a problem now exacerbated by a new surge in urban development.

Instead, the Jakarta municipality's first reaction to the storm of anger over the floods has been to restate plans to build two encircling flood canals at a cost of US$300 million (S$460 million), which water experts say that on their own will never be enough to make a long-term difference.

Rather, they say, the authorities must get the natural water system back in balance. That means harnessing floodwater from the heaviest rains which fall in the mountains around the city of Bogor, south of Jakarta, instead of allowing the run-off to flow unimpeded through Jakarta to the sea.

Hydro-geologists need to identify areas that can be turned into wetlands and other catchment areas, where the diverted water is then re-directed into the ground - not only to replenish underground aquifers depleted by urbanisation, but also to flush out increasing levels of industrial pollution.

In Jakarta itself, experts recommend the building of underground tanks in particularly flood-prone districts that would serve the same function and bring double benefits to a city that everyone agrees is running dangerously low on reliable water supplies.

Barely 30 per cent of the capital is served by piped water, with the rest of the populace relying on one million artesian wells, varying in depth from 15m to 60m. And collapsing aquifers are contributing to seasonal flooding and saltwater encroachment.

None of this is rocket science. Nor is the need for an urgent dredging programme to rid the rivers and the 160-year-old Dutch system of canals and sluice-gates of silt and other debris that only exacerbate the flooding problem.

There is no point wringing hands over the housing in large parts of the Bogor watershed, or the shopping malls and apartment blocks that have sprouted across Jakarta in the past few years. One is a result of thoughtlessness and corruption, the other simply a sign of Indonesia's general economic recovery. Neither can be undone.

'If you don't address the natural water cycle, whatever you do will not work over the long term,' says consultant John Caporn, the former deputy head of the South Australia Water Authority. 'What they are doing now is addressing the surface water problem, but not the waste water. You can't do one without the other.'

That is due largely to an institutional weakness by which no single entity has authority over the whole water system. For example, PAM Jaya, the municipal utility, is in charge only of piped water. Ground water is the domain of the Mines and Energy Ministry, and waste water and sewage fall under the Environment Ministry.

'The long-term solution has to address all these issues, not just one third,' says Mr Caporn. 'If they don't intervene and try to manage the ground water, the problem is just going to get worse and worse. It's not difficult, it's simply a matter of putting things back in balance.'

It is estimated Jakarta will need US$5 billion to US$6 billion to provide an adequate water-reticulation system, but that will depend on whether the government is prepared to improve conditions for private-sector participation.

Despite all the talk about attracting new investment at two different government-sponsored infrastructure summits, new regulations still leave tariffs firmly in the hands of local bureaucrats, without any provision for regular price hikes that would give investors a guaranteed return.

The authorities will also have to uproot the entrenched 'water mafia' - senior officials and powerful figures who, through unregistered connections and graft, have traditionally bled off the profits of most of the country's more than 300 public-water companies.

In Jakarta, it is exactly for that reason - and PAM Jaya's refusal to increase rates - which led to Thames Water's recent decision to bail out of a joint venture managing the eastern half of the city's pipe network, despite the US$108 million it claims to have invested in the business since 1998.

The irony, of course, is that raising rates would have little or no effect on 88 per cent of the city's urban poor who do not have access to piped water and have to pay twice as much for what they do get from tankers or the Mafia-run community hydrants.

Worse, private ventures such as Thames and the French-owned Lyonnaise, which manages reticulation on the more prosperous western side of Jakarta, naturally focus on hooking up better-heeled customers because the poor pay less for their water and often cannot raise the 1 million rupiah (S$170) connection fee anyway.

Overall, the sad truth is that water has always been a poor cousin to power plants, telecommunications networks and toll roads, mainly because it takes a US$5 investment to earn a US$1 profit, compared to the dollar-for-dollar ratio for phone lines.

But while it may be one of the hardest things to do, water has the biggest social and economic impact on any community. The floods have shown that, with more than 80 people dead and hundreds of thousands left homeless. It is an annual tragedy that is likely to be repeated with increasing frequency.

Pictures of Indonesia's biggest city resembling a giant lake do not play well to an outside audience, even to those who have become attuned to the earthquakes and other natural disasters that have befallen Indonesia since the luckless President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to power.

The quality of the city's water supply is bad news as well. Coated by a thick layer of algae, home to a web of inter-connected floating restaurants, the Jatiluhur dam, which supplies the capital with most of its water, looks like what it was originally designed for - an irrigation source for the surrounding rice fields.

And that is the good part. The most pressing concern is over the open, 70km-long West Tarum canal, along which the water enters Jakarta. Crossing seven heavily polluted rivers, it has become the mixing bowl for a sickening cocktail of industrial effluents, domestic waste water and solid waste before reaching treatment stations.

Water experts say it will cost about US$100 million to properly protect the canal's final 17km, where it passes through the most densely urbanised part of Jakarta. Among other things, that would involve isolating the canal from the rivers.

Planners also have to find more innovative ways to help the poor. In many parts of Jakarta, where housing density makes laying pipes next to impossible, some experts suggest building communal facilities for washing and showering, each catering to about 50-60 families.

The development of new technologies in aquifer storage recovery and storm water re-use has also led to the growth of small-scale treatment plants with computer-controlled chemical dosing, which are more economically viable than the mega plants of the past with their extensive pipe networks.