Fidelis E. Satriastanti – It has been more than a year since the Environment Ministry set up a system for whistle-blowers to lift the lid on polluting companies, but so far the results have been disappointing.
The system, which allows reports to be sent in by cellphone text message or through a Web site, was launched by the ministry in January 2010 in a bid to give people an avenue to report any activities suspected of violating environmental regulations.
Heddy Mukna, the ministry's assistant deputy for complaints and dispute resolution, said on Tuesday that the system was introduced in response to demands from members of the public who wanted to participate in environmental monitoring.
"The system has been up and running since last year, based on a 2010 ministerial regulation on complaints mechanisms, under which [complaints can] be sent in through physical reports or electronic media," he said.
But so far the ministry has followed up on only 15 text messages and six e-mails, from a total of 322 complaints.
The ministry said only 278 of the complaints related to environmental issues, with the other 44 dealing with issues that did not fall under its authority.
Even then, Heddy said, the ministry could only act on the alleged violations that fell within its jurisdiction, while all other cases had to be forwarded to the relevant authorities.
"The complaints are divided into environmental and non-environmental ones," he said.
"For environmental issues, we have to subdivide them into those that fall under our authority and those that are the responsibility of regional administrations or other authorities.
"The ministry handles things like environmental destruction and pollution, for instance, or oil spills or the erosion of riverbanks. But we also get complaints about land use changes or boundary issues, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Forestry Ministry or the National Land Agency [BPN]."
The procedure for sending complaints via text message seems straightforward. People must identify themselves, describe their complaint and identify the alleged violator, and then send the message to the number, 0811-932-932.
The ministry then calls back to confirm the report and ask the person to fill out a complaint form. If the information can be verified, the person is assigned a unique user ID to log in to the Web site penegakanhukum.menlh.go.id to monitor the development of his or her complaint.
But it is not as straightforward as it seems, said Dendy, an official at the complaints center. Dendy said the text message system was swamped with messages that had nothing to do with environmental issues. "We get messages offering credit cards, loans or even ringtones," he said.
The initial idea, he added, was that the ministry would set up a specific server for the system to block unsolicited junk messages. "But we also have difficulty confirming some of the complaints, in cases where the numbers are no longer active or fake," he said.
Dendy also said people often sent messages asking the ministry to give its employees a raise. As a result, he said, the ministry has only been able to look into 15 of the text message complaints submitted over the past year.
"We get about an average of five text messages a day, but on some days we don't get any," Dendy said.
"We've only been able to follow up on 15 of [the complaints] because not all of them can be confirmed and not all of them fall under our jurisdiction. We've directed some of these complaints to other authorities."
Abetnego Tarigan, director of Sawit Watch, a palm oil industry watchdog, said he had never heard of the complaints center. But center or no center, he said, all that mattered was that authorities enforced prevailing environmental laws.
"It shouldn't be about the quantity of reports, but about preventing violations before they happen, because that's what the [Environment Ministry] is supposed to do," he said.
"It's like the government is just waiting for reports of violations to come in instead of actively preventing those violations."