Asia | An extraordinary move

Indonesia plans to replace one unsuitable capital with another

Jakarta is crowded, polluted and sinking; Palangkaraya is just polluted and sinking

TO EXPERIENCE THE true Jakarta, sit in a taxi for an hour, listening to the motorbikes rev and the horns honk, only to realise that you are no closer to your destination than when you set off. Indonesia’s capital, home to 30m people, is in a constant state of gridlock. Meetings are routinely missed; businessfolk often call in from the back seat of a stationary vehicle. Some policemen have started a sideline selling motorcade escorts. Fumes from the sea of cars add to the smog. Public transport offers little respite: a new underground service, decades in the building, already feels jam-packed.

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The traffic is the result of decades of rapid urbanisation coupled with neglect of infrastructure. It is not the city’s only failing. There is no real centre, just a vast concrete sprawl where highways and flyovers corral skyscrapers. Parks are a rarity. So are pavements—and the few there are are crowded with makeshift restaurants, forcing pedestrians onto the heaving roads.

Another big problem is water. Torrential rain falls for half the year, but rivers and drainage ditches are clogged with rubbish and swimming with untreated sewage. They overflow regularly, flooding much of the city. Only a third of residents have access to municipal water, so the rest drill wells to tap groundwater. As a result, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other city in the world, even as sea levels rise. Some neighbourhoods are dropping at a rate of 25cm a year. Researchers think that almost all the city’s coastal districts could be submerged in 30 years.

Small wonder, then, that the president, Joko Widodo, who is known as Jokowi, wants to move the capital. On April 29th Bambang Brodjonegoro, the planning minister, announced that the government will leave the island of Java, where Jakarta sits, although it is still considering where to go. The intention, in addition to escaping (and reducing) congestion in Jakarta, is to shrink regional inequalities. Indonesia is an archipelago of 13,000 or so islands, but Java generates about 58% of GDP.

The relocation could take ten years. It is likely to face stern resistance, not least from Indonesia’s tycoons, who do not want to see the value of their Jakarta penthouses fall. Civil servants will probably object too, because the most likely new site for the capital is something of a backwater.

Palangkaraya is a city of 260,000 in the province of Central Kalimantan, part of the Indonesian portion of Borneo. Whereas Jakarta lacks greenery, Palangkaraya has it in abundance: the city is in the middle of the jungle. There is a titchy airport; the nearest seaport is a four-hour drive away, past an orangutan reserve. Much of the surrounding terrain is soft and swampy—not ideal for building skyscrapers. And when nearby peatlands burn, a toxic haze fills the air. Government officials may be sinking and choking in their new digs, too.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "An extraordinary move"

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