Development Disparity Amongst Indonesia’s Region

           

            Indonesia faces a number challenges before and after independence. And one of the main problem is the equality, whether it amongst people and region. While the disparity amongst people can be perceived in a direct way, disparity amongst region is not. In fact, many people didn’t realize it. But, actually, the disparity even can be shown in TV news. Many of the news just centre in the capital city or major region that too has dense population.

            This development disparity amongst Indonesia’s regions really become worrisome. The economic development of Indonesia become affected as well. One of the serious bottleneck in it, is the transport infrastructure ; like insufficient in quantity and inedaquate in quality, and an uneven proportion between the rural regions like Kalimantan, Papua, and Maluku between the other regions especially Sumatra, Jawa, and Sulawesi; and an expensive price of the transportation and logistics of the sheer distances between and within Indonesia’s regions.

            Not only the transport infrastructure, the road infrastructure can’t be ignored as well.  The development of the national road network grew only a quarter of the total vehicles, while the total number of the vehicles itself increased threefold between 2001 and 2010. Moreover, most of the district and city roads are in bad conditions. According to Asia-Pacific data, Kalimantan and Maluku has over 20% damaged road, while Papua only has 19% of the total classified as a good road.

            While the examples that I choose only has two infrastructures, this alone, affected many developments, such as lighting, water supply, electricity, and telecommunications. And the saddest thing is the provinces of Southeast Sulawesi and North Maluku came out worst on all five counts. This proves that the infrastructure in the eastern Indonesia is still poor, while the western Indonesia have a higher quality than them. And this also proves that there is still disparity amongst the development of Indonesia’s regions.

            From my prespective, the central government needs to give an extra focus to local government. Because in Indonesia, local government doesn’t necessarily have the capacity to design and implement their assigned infrastructure projects effectively. But to do this, central government needs to increase the quality of the staff or human resources. And it goes back to improving the education of Indonesia, and encouraging them to take the opportunities to gain skills and education, because education is still the number one most powerfull tool.

Written by : Sarfina Adani - Geology - 1506729544