Jokowi Seeks Parliament Approval to Move Capital to Borneo
Jokowi Seeks Parliament Approval to Move Capital to Borneo
(Bloomberg) -- Indonesian President Joko Widodo sought parliament’s approval to relocate the nation’s capital to the island of Borneo, home to some of the world’s biggest coal reserves and orangutan habitats, as he seeks to ease pressure on congested and polluted Jakarta.
The new administrative headquarters will “not just be a symbol of the nation’s identity, but also a representation of the nation’s progress,” Jokowi, as the president is commonly known, told a joint session of parliament in Jakarta on Friday. “This is for the sake of realizing an equal and just economy. This is for the vision of a forward-looking Indonesia. An Indonesia which lives forever.”
The new capital on the island of Borneo, known in Indonesia as Kalimantan and some 1,400 kilometers away from Jakarta, will be built from scratch will help spread economic activity outside the nation’s most-populous island of Java, the president has said. While Jokowi has yet to announce the location, Bukit Soeharto in East Kalimantan is a favorite on president’s shortlist of sites, according to province’s Governor Isran Noor.
Jokowi has displayed an urgency not shown by his predecessors in pressing on with the capital relocation plan, which has been periodically discussed for decades. With the greater Jakarta area, home to about 30 million people, nearing a gridlock and pollution levels reaching unhealthy levels, efforts to decongest the city have made little progress with tens of thousands of cars getting added to the roads every year.
Sinking City
With more than 15,000 people per square kilometer in Jakarta-- twice the density of Singapore -- there’s little space to build more without rehousing thousands of families. To make matters worse, two-fifths of the city is below sea level and parts of it are sinking at 20 centimeters a year.
Jakarta’s miserable traffic is a result of the city’s overwhelming importance in the nation’s economy. The metropolitan area generates almost a fifth of Indonesia’s annual gross domestic product. Gridlocks and public transport woes cost the city about 100 trillion rupiah ($7 billion) a year in economic losses, according to official estimates.
The cost of moving the capital is estimated at 466 trillion rupiah if it involved development of 40,000 hectares of land for an estimated 1.5 million residents, according Planning Ministry estimates. The cost could be whittled down to 323 trillion rupiah if only part of the state apparatus was shifted to an area of 30,000 hectares, it said in April.
Locations in Central and South Kalimantan are also in the reckoning, according to Planning Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro.
The government plans to begin construction of the new city from 2021 and may start relocating some offices from 2024, according to Brodjonegoro. The project will be financed by the government as well as through private-public partnerships.
To contact the reporters on this story: Arys Aditya in Jakarta at aaditya5@bloomberg.net;Viriya Singgih in Jakarta at vsinggih@bloomberg.net;Eko Listiyorini in Jakarta at elistiyorini@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Thomas Kutty Abraham at tabraham4@bloomberg.net, Karlis Salna
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