Putri Prameshwari – The country has reduced its slum population by at least half in the last two decades, the fastest among Southeast Asian countries, according to a United Nations report released on Friday.
"State of the World's Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide," an annual report released by the organization's agency for human settlements, UN Habitat, stated that in 1990, more than 50 percent of Indonesians lived in slum conditions.
In 2000, the percentage had decreased to between 25.1 percent and 35 percent. This year, the figure has improved further with the total number of people living in slums recorded at between 15 and 25 percent, according to the report.
"Countries in Southeast Asia improved the living conditions of 33 million slum dwellers – a decrease of 22 percent," the report said, noting that in the region, Indonesia and Vietnam had made the most significant strides in recent decades.
The major successes, however, were in China and India, which together saw at least 125 million people escape slum conditions over the past two decades.
However, the picture was less satisfactory globally, the report said, with the number of slum dwellers worldwide increasing by 55 million over the last 10 years to a total of 827.6 million this year.
Edy Saidi of social watchdog Urban Poor Consortium, said the report did not really reflect a lot of the reality on the ground, as the government still had an insufficient number of programs to assist slum dwellers.
"For example, when 10,000 families were thrown out of their homes under the North Jakarta turnpike, they relocated elsewhere," he said. "They scattered to create new slum areas."
Although the Public Housing Ministry has provided subsidized apartments across the country, Edy said these had not been properly planned.
"The locations are never strategic enough for the slum dwellers," he said, adding that the government often evicted them from their homes without providing new ones first.
According to the UN Habitat report, a total of 227 million people across the world have escaped slum conditions since 2000. However, it also said that "the progress made on the slum target has not been enough to counter the growth of informal settlements in the developed world."
The report also said that efforts to reduce the number of slum residents were "neither satisfactory nor adequate," with more than 50 percent of the world's population of nearly 3.5 billion now living in urban areas. It also said that in 2020, the world's slum population could grow by six million each year if no drastic action is taken.
The report was released five years before the deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, one of which is to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers around the world by 2020.