Jakarta – The government admitted Wednesday that water services across the archipelago are unlikely to meet the 2015 target set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Director General of Water Resources at the Public Works Ministry Iwan Nursyirwan said that Indonesia currently provides piped water to just 24 percent of its population, or 50 of the 220 million Indonesians, of which 55 percent are located in urban areas.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1.1 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water; 4.5 percent of that number are in Indonesia.
Oswar, a senior official at the National Development Planning Agency, said recently that access to safe drinking water in Indonesia is increasing at a rate of less than 1 percent per year. That means Indonesia is nowhere near meeting its MDG target of bringing water to 80 percent of the population by 2015.
"We have to work hard to meet the target, I know that it seems impossible," Iwan said during a Seminar about Water Resources Management and Development in South Jakarta.
The government has set a target of bringing piped water to 10 million households within the next five years as part of its commitment to meet the MDGs, Iwan said.
Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation in the world, joined 191 other nations when it signed the MDG agreement in New York in 2000. Along with 23 participating international organizations, member nations have agreed to achieve the set targets, which include reducing poverty, improving access to clean water, reducing child mortality rates and fighting disease epidemics, by the year 2015.
The MDG seeks to halve the number of people in the world without access to safe drinking water by 2015.
According to data from the Public Works Ministry, the government has allocated Rp 7.4 trillion (US$720 million) this year to improve the quality of tap water.
Other relevant ministry programs include the construction of communal septic tanks in 80 cities and a toilet use campaign being implemented in 500 villages across the nation.
However, according to the World Bank, Indonesia would need about US$4.6 billion to reach the MDG target.
Iwan said that pouring money into public works would be very important but would not be enough to handle water problems in Indonesia. "The growing population has made it much more difficult to overcome," he said.
Rampant population growth in urban areas has played a major role in escalating water pollution, Iwan said. "Beside that, the lack of proper maintenance of water infrastructure has also degraded water quality."
The ministry's data shows that only about 65 percent of Jakartans have piped water services; the rest use ground water. The massive use of ground water has led to serious problems, such as the intrusion of salt and chemical pollutants into water people then consume, Iwan said.
The WHO has warned that dirty water causes deadly diseases including diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. According to WHO data, such diseases killed 1.6 million children as of 2005, with an annual mortality rate of 4,500.
A study conducted by the Amrta Institute for Water Literacy in Bantul regency, Yogyakarta, earlier this year indicated that water samples taken from a water source used by local people for their daily use contained E-coli bacteria two to 32 times above the level tolerated by the Health Ministry.
It concluded that it means that small towns and villages that were once described as healthy and green are now polluted.
Observers have said that this finding is likely to be the tip of the iceberg on the pollution level of water in small towns and villages in Indonesia, with the possibility that the level of water pollution there is similar to that in major cities in the country.
They said one of the reasons is the presents of industry in rural areas. (bbs)