By IPS Correspondents
JAKARTA, Jul 8 2005 (IPS)

For several weeks now, Soesi Trisnosiswoyo, 63, has been anxiously calling up officers manning floodgates at Manggarai, South Jakarta and at Depok, West Java daily to check on water levels.

If water levels at the Manggarai and Depok floodgates cross the danger marks of 6.8 metres and 1.25 metres respectively, Trisnosiswoyo and his aides would go around Bidara Cina, a densely populated village on the banks of the Ciliwung river in East Jakarta, and warn residents to brace for floods.

”After being informed that the two floodgates have surpassed their limits, residents of Bidara Cina would immediately string ropes from one electricity post to another so they have something to cling on to above ground level,” said Trisnosiswoyo, head of a sub-district in Bidara Cina.

Discarded tyres which find use as life-jackets and floats are also trundled out. For the residents of Bidara Cina, the most congested area in Jakarta, flooding as high as three meters is not uncommon but they have learned to live with it.

”Floods have become a part of our lives,” said Yani, a 53-year-old laundrywoman whose home has been submerged more than ten times since January this year. ”When Bidara Cina is hit by floods, it is like swimming in the sea,” she added.

When it rains in Jakarta, Bidara Cina does not usually get inundated. But if there is heavy downpour in Bogor, a town an hour’s drive from Jakarta, the village gets flooded because the Manggarai and Depok floodgates are opened.

Rainy season in Java province, which includes Jakarta city, normally occurs from November to March, but the highland areas of Bogor, have been experiencing abnormally heavy rainfall.

With floods recurrent in Bidara Cina, the village has been designated as a pilot area since 2002 for implementation of an integrated urban river management programme supported by the Dutch government.

Due to sedimentation and the presence of squatters occupying the embankment, the Ciliwung river, which originates in Mt. Pangrango, Bogor and ends in the Java sea, is becoming narrower and silting up.

From its original width of 165 metres, the Ciliwung river, a source of water supply for residents of Jakarta, is now only 10 metres wide. Water from Ciliwung river is treated and distributed as tap water to residents of the capital.

Authorities say that Ciliwung is the most difficult of Java’s 20 polluted rivers to manage because many zones along the riverbanks have been "illegally" occupied. In Bidara Cina alone, there are more than 5,600 households occupying the river banks.

"People living in Bidara Cina are poor and we have to alleviate their poverty," said Friso M. Roest, a representative of the Dutch government.

Most residents of Bidara Cina are vendors and have been living on its banks for up to 50 years. Some residents are from the far-flung provinces of Maluku and West Papua.

"People in Bidara Cina have no place to go," said Ferry Wibowo, one of the few educated people in the village appointed by Dutch authorities to supervise the implementation of the village improvement project, a component of the urban river management programme.

Under the village improvement project, the Dutch government provided 700 million rupiah (US 72,916 dollars) to build infrastructure such as roads, dykes, public toilets, public meeting places and drainage systems.

Lack of adequate drainage is a major problem in Bidara Cina with existing drainage systems mostly clogged with garbage.

"We are now feeling the positive effects of the village improvement project," said 43-year-old Geraldo Tomasowa, secretary-general of a sub- district in Bidara Cina.

Tomasowa said, unlike in the past, residents of Bidara Cina now walk on cemented footpaths instead of muddy lanes and bathe in public bathrooms instead of bathing in the river.

Another component of the urban river management programme is increasing public awareness on proper waste management, as most of the residents throw away their garbage into the river.

"The increased urbanisation of the banks of the Ciliwung river brings with it the problem of waste management," said Atung Deddy Rudiansyah, deputy assistant on domestic waste at the State Ministry of Environment.

Huge amounts of waste thrown by the residents of Bidara Cina into the Ciliwung river add to the rapidity with which water levels at the floodgates of Manggarai and Depok rise above their normal levels.

As part of efforts to restore the Ciliwung river, the Ministry runs programmes to teach residents of Bidara Cina how to reduce, reuse and recycle their waste.

Schoolchildren are being taught the importance efficient waste segregation and handling and making their village ‘green’ by cultivating plants. "Children could influence their parents not to dispose rubbish into the river," Rudiansyah said.

However, lack of waste containers and scarcity of land for the composting tempt Bidara Cina residents to simply chuck garbage into the Ciliwung which has a catchment area of more than 337 sq kms.

"Encroachment on the Ciliwung river increases the chance of floods not only in Bidara Cina, but the whole city of Jakarta," said Roestam Sjarief, secretary general of the Ministry of Public Works.

Yearly floods in Jakarta cause heavy losses. For instance, the 2002 floods in Jakarta, the worst in 30 years, was estimated to have caused over a billion dollars worth of damage and rendered more than 400,000 people homeless.

Sjarief’s ministry revealed that Jakarta’s present water absorption capacity is only 10 percent, compared to 40 percent in the 1970s because major parts of the capital have been covered with concrete and become impervious.

"We are tired of being constantly hit by floods, but we have no choice," said Trisnosiswoyo, who has been living in Bidara Cina for 36 years now.

"It’s not easy to relocate the people, as the government is facing the classical problem of insufficient funds," said Poernomosidhi Poerwo, a director at the Ministry of Settlement and Regional Infrastructure.

Poerwo added that when residents of Bidara Cina learned that there were plans by the government to relocate them, the number of houses constructed along the banks of Ciliwung river rapidly increased.

"People started building houses along the riverbanks in the hope that they would qualify for alternative housing," he told IPS.

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