Markus Junianto Sihaloho & Camelia Pasandaran – The government's announcement of a planned 10 percent pay raise for civil servants next year was criticized by lawmakers and activists on Wednesday as not being in the public interest.

In presenting the draft 2012 state budget to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said the government has decided to raise the basic salary of civil servants, military, police and retirees by 10 percent.

The announcement came as the government mulls a moratorium on civil servant recruitment due to the state's ballooning payroll burden. Finance Minister Agus Martowardojo had said that having 4.7 million civil servants on the payroll was excessive.

A coalition of nongovernmental organizations on Wednesday said the announcement was evidence the government only cared for the bureaucracy and not the estimated 32 million living below the poverty line.

NGO coalition spokesman Ridaya La Ode Ngkowe said there was no difference between the proposed 2012 state budget and the current budget, both of which allocate large chunks for bureaucracy.

With the 10 percent increase, he said, Rp 216 trillion ($25.3 billion) would be allotted for civil servants next year, up Rp 33 trillion from this year. Meanwhile, the government's programs for the poor would stay at the current level of about Rp 50 trillion, he said.

"It means that the government has never awakened from its long sleep and that the state budget is never aimed at increasing the welfare of the poor", Ridaya said.

Uchok Sky Khadafi, from the Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (Fitra), said instead of renegotiating foreign mining and energy contracts to raise state revenues, the government preferred to keep increasing taxes on citizens.

Eva Kusuma Sundari, a lawmaker from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), said the decision to raise civil servant salaries came because the government did not know how to spend state money on quality programs.

"The Education Ministry gets 20 percent of the total budget but they don't know what to do with it. The easiest way to spend it is by raising the salary of the teachers," Eva said.

But for Harinowo, a middle-class man living in Depok, West Java, he could understand the planned pay raise in the context of curbing corruption within the bureaucracy. "I hope that with a pay raise, the civil servants can stop corruption," he said.