Jakarta – Regional administrations are using the money paid out to schools under the national fuel compensation scheme as an excuse to cut back on their education budgets, a study has found.
Although the school funds worth Rp 6.27 trillion (about US$670 million) in 2005 only covered 32 percent of schools' operational costs, local administrations viewed these extra funds as valid reasons to lower their education budgets, the study's coordinator, Sukamdi, told a meeting on Friday.
The Gadjah Mada University lecturer said his team of researchers from 56 universities had studied conditions in 112 cities and regencies throughout Indonesia.
Almost all the cities and regencies studied had made some cuts to education funding, showing a lack of commitment to realizing the national nine-year Compulsory Education Program, Sukamdi said.
National Education Ministry spokesman Rusmadi said the local administrations were not doing their share.
"Mayoralties and regencies should have provided one third of the school operational expenditure while the provincial governments should have provided the other third," Rusmadi told The Jakarta Post.
He said providing adequate budgets for education should be the moral obligation of local governments and councils. Local officials should be drafting policies that would help improve the quality of education, he said.
The allocation of school operational funds is part of the government's effort to compensate the poor after the national fuel subsidies were cut last year, causing prices to increase by more than 100 percent. Other measures include the provision of health insurance for the poor, village infrastructure development and the distribution of cash aid.
The team's evaluation of the fuel compensation funds also found that the cash aid was only 39 percent effective in helping reduce the burden on poor people after the price hike.
To improve the effectiveness of the fuel compensation programs, Sukamdi said, government ministries should integrate their data about low income groups and streamline bureaucratic procedures.
"They should use the same data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS)," he said. That data also needed to be properly updated and verified regularly, he said.
"This way, every ministry would have the same data. One poor family can then get cash aid, health insurance and an education subsidy," Sukamdi said.
Coordination among the ministries charged with distributing the aid also had to be improved.
Despite the criticisms of the program, Coordinating Minister of People's Welfare Aburizal Bakri has said it would continue until September without significant changes. This year's cash aid will amount to Rp 17 trillion.