Vaudine England, Jakarta – An educated, professional Indonesian civil servant – let's call him Johannes – once had a senior, apparently stable job in a region outside Jakarta. His pay and responsibilities came from Jakarta and, though nothing like that received by his intellectual equals in the West, it did arrive with reassuring predictability.

One year on, Johannes is depending for survival on the savings of his wife and sister-in-law. He has taken a lower level position in a remote district in Kalimantan in response to the changes forced on him by new regional autonomy laws. But although he keeps going to his office with impressive regularity, he has not been paid for a year.

His story shows the downside of the implementation of regional autonomy whereby local regents now hire and fire, collect taxes, decide spending and have the power to grant contracts and foreign investment approvals.

In the past it was the central Government in Jakarta that kept a startlingly comprehensive list of such powers in its hands, some of which were administered through a few million civil servants sent out to the regions with status and sway over the locals.

But lauded as a way for more of Indonesia's vast population to have a say in their own lives, the autonomy reforms also have an arbitrary and dramatic effect on people's lives.

Johannes' problems began with his transfer to a provincial capital in Kalimantan just when regional autonomy was starting to come into force on January 1 last year.

The local power-holders in government offices there soon decided they had no need for Johannes, so his salary from Jakarta reached the local branch of a state bank but never reached Johannes. "There was no trail, the money just never arrived," a relative said. "Every time he asked for his salary, he was told he would get a lump sum when his position was confirmed."

Johannes' friends lent him money so he could go to Jakarta to discuss matters with old colleagues, some of whom were now high-ranking. But power at the centre does not necessarily mean power in any district, and Johannes' friends could do nothing. They advised him to take a job in a district 29 hours' drive from the provincial capital. Though worse than what he was used to, it would at least let him get a lump sum in back pay.

It was a tough choice, but he made it. Yet somehow nothing has changed. He has still not been paid and there has been no back-pay either. He has neither the house nor the car that are supposed to accompany his position as his predecessor will not give them up. His own previously senior position has been given to a man with impeccable credentials as an indigenous resident but with no relevant qualification for the job.

Johannes cannot even go back to his own original district in Sumatra, as the boundaries there have been redrawn and his ethnic base has shifted.

Now getting on in years, he could only start again with his juniors above him. "He's a victim of a classic civil service mentality here – don't question anything, just look for ways around it to make a buck," one of Johannes' friends said.

Not everyone has been as unlucky as Johannes, and to some of the decentralisation law designers, his plight is sad but the price to be paid for what is still a vital process of economic and political democratisation.

"Regions do not know how to rationalise the bloated administrations they have inherited," wrote Owen Podger, a management consultant and team leader for an Asian Development Bank project in support of decentralisation.

"They have inherited inefficiency, inappropriate appointments, overlapping functions, and many officers known to be corrupt or unsympathetic who, in the New Order, thrived in their higher status than the local administrators.

"This means that regions do not yet know how to overcome the problems that already existed because of the centralist system." "But at least they are now aware of the problem that the centralist system refused to see," he added.