Armando Siahaan – Though the idea is practically dead in the House of Representatives, the Regional Representatives Council on Tuesday revived a controversial proposal to allocate Rp 1 billion ($110,000) from the state budget for development programs in each of the country's roughly 70,000 villages.

Through the proposed scheme, the council, known as the DPD, aims to reverse the current state of budgetary politics where 70 percent is determined by the central government and only 30 percent by the regions, said Jhon Pieris, the head of DPD Committee IV.

Ideally, the country's budgeting should be a balance between bottom-up and top-down planning, he said, but as things are now, the executive government has the most say. "The people's aspirations may not be the same as the central government's aspirations," he said.

Jhon emphasized that the government would still implement the development projects and the money would be channeled through regional budgets, so the scheme did not deviate from the current mechanism. "We will guard the implementation of the program," he said.

Jhon said the proposal would be raised in the next DPD plenary session on July 13, before it was passed on to the House to be included in the 2011 state budget.

Laode Ida, the deputy chairman of the council, said the impetus behind the proposal derived from the fact that members of the DPD and the House had the political obligation to fight for their constituents. "They often perceive us as failing to struggle for their needs," he said, adding that the DPD and the House should serve as bridges between the people and the government.

The DPD's proposed scheme bears a great resemblance to the Golkar Party's proposal to allocate Rp 1 billion to each village.

Golkar made the proposal after its earlier idea that lawmakers each be given a Rp 15 billion "aspiration fund" for their constituencies was rejected. Laode denied the DPD was following Golkar, only that it was "inspired" by it.

Still, the idea might meet the same fate as Golkar's proposal. Yuna Farhan, from the Indonesia Forum for Budget Transparency (Fitra), said the village fund would only widen the economic gap in the regions.

If Rp 70 trillion were allocated to the village development fund, about 40 percent of it would end up in Java's six provinces, according to Fitra, while the remaining 27 provinces would share the rest.