15 Million Families Experience Clean Water Shortages
Monday, 13 November, 2006 | 17:21 WIB

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: Around 30 percent, or 15 million out of 45 million families in Indonesia, are yet to have proper clean water facilities.

They are spread out in 30,000 villages out of around 70,000 villages in Indonesia.

“We are testing out effective ways of handling this,” said the State Minister for the Accelerated Development of Disadvantaged Regions Saifullah Yusuf on Friday (11/10).

According to the Minister, there were three ways so far identified for solving this.

The first step would be by building clean water infrastructure facilities and then hand them over directly to people or allow people build the facility by themselves.

Second: the government would partially be involved in the process of building the clean water facility and the rest would be covered out by NGOs.

“The third way is that the government would build the whole system from financing and supplying divisions,” said Saifullah.

Nevertheless, the last would only be carried out in remote regions.

The minister has estimated that in order to supply appropriate clean water, the required funds will be around Rp500 million per village.

This means that Rp15 trillion of funds would be needed for providing clean water facilities at 30,000 villages.

Saifullah mentioned that in addition to the shortage of clean water facilities, there were around 40,000 villages that did not have telecommunication facilities.

There were also 28,000 villages that were not reached by cellular phone signals.

MUSTAFA MOSES