1,000TRIL RUPIAH TOLL ROAD SPLURGE
Indonesia’s fee-charging highways may hit 5,400km by 2024
PRESIDENT Joko Widodo, also known as Jokowi, is planning an unprecedented 1,000 trillion rupiah (RM290.3 billion) splurge on toll roads to help connect the most strung-out country on the planet.
It’s almost the equivalent of laying bitumen from New York to San Francisco.
By 2024, Indonesia’s fee-charging highways would stretch for 5,400km, almost triple the length of the current network, said Danang Parikesit, head of the country’s toll-road regulator.
The government wants to make it easier to haul food and fuel across the world’s largest archipelago. But there’s already concern about how the highways will be funded.
Analysts fret that the funding burden will strain Indonesia’s banking system and the balance sheets of local construction companies.
The government couldn’t foot the whole bill itself and was seeking other sources of capital such as bank loans and private funding, said Danang.
“Infrastructure will grow rapidly and faster than before.”
The roads rollout is central to the government’s ambitious plans for more than US$400 billion (RM1.66 trillion) of building projects to modernise Indonesia under Jokowi, when he begins his second term in October.
The extensive sprawl of Indonesia, a nation dispersed across 17,000 islands, is a logistical nightmare and can send the cost of everyday items soaring and hampering development in tough-to-access locations.
So the only way to generate faster economic growth was through connectivity, said Planning Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro last month.
More than half the new toll roads will be rolled out on Sumatra to connect the two ends of the enormous island.
Danang, who’s also a professor in civil engineering, said advanced construction techniques would be required in some locations — to hold up a road bridge 100m above the ground or to build several kilometres of tunnels.
In addition to the highways, the regulator was also studying the possibility of building a bridge from Sumatra to Peninsular Malaysia, and a bridge connecting Singapore to Bintan island, said Danang.