Shawn Donnan, Jakarta – Indonesia is planning to hire 1 million new civil servants over the next three years despite concerns expressed by foreign investors, donors and institutions such as the World Bank that it already has a bloated government bureaucracy.

The plan, announced this week by three government ministers, would see the new civil servants hired primarily for the ailing health and education sectors.

In comments reported in the local press yesterday and confirmed by aides, the ministers argued the move would be in line with Indonesia's population growth. The archipelago of 18,000 islands has a population of almost 220m people, making it the world's fourth most populous nation.

The country's current 3.5 million civil servants account for only about 1.6 per cent of its population, the ministers argued, putting it far below the ratio in neighbouring countries such as Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore.

"We want to increase the number [of civil servants] to at least 2 per cent of the total population in the next three years," Feisal Tamin, minister for administrative reform, was quoted as saying by the English-language Jakarta Post.

However, most foreign investors see Indonesia's bureaucracy as a bloated barrier to business. More foreign investment is vital if Indonesia is to return to the 6-7 per cent growth it needs to absorb millions of new entrants to the labour force.

Dominated by survivors from the Suharto era, the public service is seen as the source of much of the rampant corruption that regularly puts Indonesia at the bottom of watchdog Transparency International's annual rankings.

Experts say the last thing Indonesia needs is more civil servants. Government schools and clinics suffer from high rates of absenteeism. The average first-grade teacher attends school for less than three hours a day, a World Bank survey found last year, while government doctors had an "astounding" absenteeism rate of 42 per cent.

[Additional reporting by Taufan Hidayat.]