Jakarta – Indonesia's exponential annual growth rate of 1.49 percent will overload and over-stretch the country's limited resources, potentially ushering in a host of new problems in coming years, population watchers say.
The rate translates into at least 3.5 million births per year which will significantly augment the current population size of 237.6 million people. In just five more years, Indonesia's population could swell to more than 250 million people.
According to Sri Sunarti Purwa-ningsih, a demographer at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), the rapid population growth would impact the provision of basic needs. "Planning and the provision of facilities for certain age groups becomes vital with large populations," she told The Jakarta Post.
Already problematic housing issues would amplify as more people migrate to cities and set up low-cost houses in squatter areas by river sides and railway tracks, she added.
"This migration will considerably increase the burden on the land as more people consume resources such as clean water, which are already difficult for many to obtain," Sri Sunarti said. "People will fight for these limited resources."
The poor would accept such living conditions as long as they were close to employment areas, which were more numerous in big cities, she said.
The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) data shows that Indonesia's workforce amounted 171.02 million people, but only 116 million were employed, as of February this year.
With a majority of the population being under-educated, most would be stuck in low-level jobs, University of Indonesia (UI) demography and labor expert Sri Moertiningsih Adioetomo said.
It is even more essential that the number of employment opportunities could keep up with the rapid expansion of the workforce. "If it doesn't, there will be mass unemployment or people will take whatever job they can find," she said. "This situation could trigger higher crime rates."
Sri added that the effect of limited incomes would filter into the family unit as parents' capacity to provide good educations, nutrition and healthcare for their children became considerably weakened, especially without state social programs.
"If no attention is given to this problem right now, the circle of poverty will continue," she said, adding that current economic indicators were insufficient to show poverty reduction because economic growth had failed to decrease unemployment and poverty.
Indonesia's economic growth stood at 4.5 percent in 2009. That year's number of poor stood at 32.5 million people, the BPS data shows. "The government does not consider demography important, which explains why unemployment and poverty persist," Sri added.
The 2010 census data shows that 58 percent of the population is concentrated in Java.
The massive population growth affected policies in maximizing the state budget, such as in the field of education, UI sociologist Robert M.Z. Lawang said.
As more children enter school, the government will have to increase education subsidies to fully implement the nine-year mandatory education program, Lawang told the Post. (gzl)