Ulma Haryanto & Arientha Primanita, Jakarta – Like the hundreds of thousands of other repeat flood victims in the capital, Andi and Sudarmati have no furniture on the ground floor of their home in Pondok Labu, South Jakarta, along the Krukut River.
"When I first moved here in the '90s we bought a television set, refrigerator and sofa. A couple of months later, the floods came. Our electronics were destroyed," Sudarmati said.
In what has become a regular ritual in Pondok Labu, residents evacuated on Friday night after the Krukut overflowed following heavy rains. Waters reached up to two meters high. "The water receded around 9 p.m., we got back to our homes shortly after that and started cleaning up," Andi said.
The river was dredged in June, and some families have built small dikes surrounding their homes to protect them from surging water. But asked if they wanted to live somewhere else, Sudarmati answered: "I am used to the floods."
The flooding, along with the recent collapses of a road and embankment, point to the neglected problem of land subsidence in the capital, experts say.
They blame groundwater extraction by factories, hotels, shopping centers and other developments, as well as backyard wells, for causing the land to sink by an average of 5 to 10 centimeters a year.
With limited green space in the capital, rainwater cannot easily be reabsorbed into the ground, which in turn increases dependence on dikes and pumps.
According to Firdaus Ali, executive director of the Indonesian Water Institute, the worst-hit areas are sinking by as much as 26 centimeters a year. Some areas have already sunk between one and two meters over the past few decades.
Some experts have said that North Jakarta could be washed off the map completely by 2050.
The city uses 532 million cubic meters of groundwater per year, or 46 percent of known supply, according to the Indonesian Green Institute. It is replenished at a much slower rate.
Private households in Jakarta are prohibited from drawing groundwater, although many do so to avoid paying for utilities.
The administration is trying to get more people to connect to the main supply, and has raised the fee for groundwater use sevenfold since last year for the 4,000 registered commercial and industrial users – from Rp 3,300 (37 cents) per cubic meter to Rp 23,000 – in a bid to limit the amount extracted.
Wealthy households will pay up to 16 times more, from Rp 52 to Rp 8,800 per cubic meter.
However the capital's profit-oriented economic policies, including the boon from groundwater extraction taxes, have been blamed for the city's reluctance to deal with the problem.
Iwan Setiawandi, head of Jakarta's Tax Office, denied that the city administration was entirely at fault, saying that extraction of groundwater was inevitable.
He added that the capital's revenue from groundwater was ninth on the list of the city's top 10 primary revenue streams. The target revenue fro groundwater taxes is Rp 150 billion this year. As of September, it had raised Rp 110 billion.