IN JAKARTA

IT WAS no surprise that the journal Businessweek last week highlighted Jakarta's poor sanitation as one reason for ranking it as the second worst place in the world to work.

While Jakarta may not deserve such a harsh ranking, it is as well-known for dirty air, trash-filled streets and rubbish-clogged canals as it is for famous hip clubs and high-end malls.

A lack of proper sewage systems and a careless attitude towards disposing of personal waste seem to be the key reasons for why trash is all around.

The Government is starting at a basic level though, and targeting those who have no qualms about literally dumping their waste in public.

On Monday, a senior official from the Ministry of Public Works announced that the focus of sanitation projects from next year to 2014 would be to "eliminate defecating in random places".

This would be done through having better communal sanitation systems in villages and slum areas in cities, and educating people, said Mr Budi Yuwono, according to The Jakarta Globe newspaper.

Mr Budi also spoke about the problem of polluted rivers, which in some cases are key sources of drinking water for nearby towns and cities.

For instance, a 2005 report found that the bacteria concentration in the Surabaya river, near the city of Surabaya, was 64,000 times more than the tolerable level. The city government has blamed businesses and police are investigating.

In Jakarta, there is the long and polluted Ciliwung River. It is one of 13 rivers which altogether end up carrying some 240 tonnes of the 6,000 tonnes of garbage disposed of in Jakarta each day, according to the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (WALHI).

The city administration is struggling to clean it up now. They have blamed companies for polluting it but the many slum-dwellers living elbow-to-elbow along the river's 117-km bank are also a factor. And city officials will have to contend with more than 50,000 of them in their clean-up efforts.

Crammed into makeshift shanties where they eat, sleep, pray, the riverbank residents use the river as both bathroom and playground. Children can often be seen wading in it.

Others see it as their workplace, scavenging the murky waters daily for plastic containers, glass bottles and metal cans that they can re-sell. They claim their livelihood helps the Government reduce river pollution.

A child works on the polluted river in Jakarta, Indonesia.
SOURCE: REUTERS

In previous years, efforts to resettle them have fallen through. In 2000, there was a proposal to build low-cost apartments for them but that was never realised.

Resettling these residents may now prove to be a bigger challenge than the bid to stop people from pooping in public.