Jakarta – Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) chairwoman Wardah Hafidz said on Saturday that the number of poor people without ID cards in the city could be five times greater than the 100,000 reported earlier by the Jakarta Bureau of Statistics.

"It must be far more than only 100,000. It could be five times higher," she said.

Wardah gave as an example the slum in Kampung Sawah in Cilincing, North Jakarta, where over 2,000 poor families live, 70 percent of which do not have ID cards. "This is an attempt by the city administration to conceal the poverty problem by discounting their existence here," she said.

She also lambasted the unfair treatment received by the poor. "Such discriminative treatment of poor people is common by the administration simply to force them out of the city to ease overcrowding here," Wardah said. "However, it's obviously against human rights as well as a citizen's rights as stipulated in our Constitution."

The Jakarta Statistics Bureau reported on Thursday the results of a 2000 survey that found the total population in the capital was 8.38 million, with the total of absolute poor at some 340,000. Of the total impoverished people, 32,983 poor families or over 100,000 people do not have ID cards, the report says.