Maladies of Dhaka, Jakarta -MA Jalkifal

With global temperature rising and ice sheets melting, which causes sea level to rise, plenty of coastal cities across the world are facing impending risks of flooding, water logging or going underwater. Few islands like Maldives, Togo and deltaic land Bangladesh face crucial challenges. The Indonesian city of Jakarta is no exception to these places under threat of climate change. Metropolitans like Jakarta and Dhaka — capital cities of Indonesia and Bangladesh — are met with rapid urbanization, land use and population growth. These two mega metropolitan areas have many things in common to be dogged by of course some in uncommon. Concentration of wealth is a cause of concern which is hardly addressed in the heydays of capitalism. Traffic congestion is another woe of these capitals, prompting the authorities to expand the cities as they have stretched to their limit, exploiting most of their natural resources like water, land and environment. Anyway both of the Asian cities are unsustainable. Indonesia has decided to discard jeopardized Jakarta — the Indonesian capital which is a conglomeration of 32 million people. Despite plethora of problems plaguing Dhaka, it is not being discarded anytime soon but it was divided into north and south city corporations several years ago aiming at reaching the benefits of city corporations. All the efforts to ensure services to all the citizens went in vain as promises and pie crusts are always made to be broken.

Since the city’s early days, flooding has been a problem because Jakarta is situated along several rivers that swell during the monsoon season. In recent decades the flooding problem has grown even worse, driven partly by widespread pumping of groundwater that has caused the land to sink or subside at rapid rates. By some estimates more than 40 per cent of Jakarta city is now below sea level.

With mean global sea level rising by 3.3 millimeters per year and amid signs that rainstorms are getting more intense as the atmosphere heats up and damaging floods have become common. Since 1990 major floods have happened every few years in Jakarta with thousands of people ending up dead. The monsoon in 2007 brought especially damaging floods, with more than 70 per cent of the city submerged.

Rapid urbanization, land use and population growth have exacerbated the problem of Jakarta as is the case with Dhaka. The evolution of the city over the past three decades. The widespread replacement of forests and other vegetation impervious services in inland areas along the Ciliwung and Cisadane rivers has reduced how much the water, the landscape can absorb contributing to run off and flash floods. With the population of the metropolitan area more than doubling between 1990 and 2020, more people have crowded into high risk floodplains. Also many rivers and canals have narrowed or become periodically clogged with sediment and trash, making them especially prone to overflowing.

Since 1990 artificial land and new development has been spreading into the shallow water of Jakarta bay. Much of the land has been used for high end residential development and a golf course. Such development comes with risk because they sit at the front line of Jakarta’s inevitable battle against sea level rise and storm surges.

Artificial islands are often among the fastest type of land to subside because their sand and soils settle and become compacted over time. Satellites and ground level sensors have recorded parts of North Jakarta subsiding by dozens of millimeters a year.

Some of the new islands were built as part of Jakarta’s National Capital Integrated Coastal Development masterplan, an effort to protect the city from flooding and to foster economic development. A key initiative was the construction of a giant sea wall and 17 new artificial Islands around Jakarta bay. Though work on the project began in 2015 a range of environmental and economic problems have slowed construction.

The plan to construct a huge sea wall is still in place but it may not be enough to save Jakarta from it’s current situation with environmental pressures mounting Indonesian politicians hope to move the seat of government from Jakarta to the island of Borneo.
Not only is Jakarta the largest metropolitan in Southeast Asia, it is the most dynamic though beset with most of the urban problems experienced in twenty first century Southeast Asia.

Population
Jakarta has been the capital of Indonesia since the Dutch colonial era and the economical, commercial and transportation center of the nation and the economical, commercial and transportation center of the nation. The population of Jakarta in 1900 was about 115000. After independence however the population of Jakarta increased by nearly three times in five decades to 1.43 million people by 1950. By 2010 the population rose to 28.01 million people. The megacity in 2010 was 11.79 percent of Indonesia’s total population, but this population resides in 0.3 percent of Indonesia’s total land area. With a whopping population of 21,741,000, it is the 6th most densely populated city in the world, occupied by around 29 029 people per square km (Wright, 2020). It is currently the world’s fastest growing megacity, growing by 3.5% since 2015 (World Population Review, 2021).

Motor vehicles
Rapid urbanization in the megacity of Jakarta caused a wide range of urban problems in the last few decades. If the number of people increases at this rate in the megacity of Jakarta then there will be one problem that will be of the most concern, traffic congestion. Jakarta is estimated to lose US $ 3 billion a year because of traffic congestion which should not be separated from the high growth rate of vehicle ownership. The vehicles whose growth rate of ownership increased drastically are motorcycles. Motorcycle ownership skyrocketed, from 1.62 million bike owners in 2000 to 7.52 million bike owners in 2010 and 13.08 bike owners in 2014. Motorcycle ownership plummeted in almost three decades because motorcycles are ubiquitous and can be acquired with a down payment of as low as $30. Another reason for motorcycle growth plummeting is because the people living in the outskirts of Jakarta can save as much as 30 percent of their transportation costs by using motorcycles to go to work rather than using public transport to go to work.

The number of motorcycle users in Bangladesh has grown rapidly in the past few years. According to BRTA, the number of registered motorcycles increased about four times in the last decade, from 759,257 in 2010 to 2,991,612 in 2020. A report from the Daily Star in June last year showed around 5 lakh motorcycles were sold in FY 2018-19, up 25 per cent from 4 lakh a year ago. It means nearly 1,500 motorcycles are being purchased every day. There were 160170 registered private cars in Dhaka up to the year 2010. However, the figure jumped to 302993 up to February 2021 (Source BRTA).

About 132,000 motorcycles were registered between 2017 and July 2018 in Dhaka. Due to rapid increase in the number of vehicles, air pollution in Dhaka has been the most over the last few months. In consequence, the air of Dhaka has been the most polluted one.

Groundwater
The dramatic rate at which Jakarta is sinking is partly down to the excessive extraction of groundwater for use as drinking water, for bathing and other everyday purposes by city dwellers. Piped water isn’t reliable or available in most areas so people have no choice but to resort to pumping water from the aquifers deep underground.
People say they have no choice when the authorities are unable to meet their water needs and experts confirm that water management authorities can only meet 40% of Jakarta’s demand for water.

There is technology to replace groundwater deep at its source but it’s extremely expensive. Tokyo used this method, known as artificial recharge, when it faced severe land subsidence 50 years ago. The government also restricted groundwater extraction and businesses were required to use reclaimed water. Land subsidence subsequently halted.

The main reasons lie under overconsumption and lack of recharge due to urbanization. Almost 82 % of the supply of water in Dhaka City is dependent on groundwater. To fulfill this huge demand of water, groundwater level is declining by 2-3 meters each year (Anwar Zahid, 2011). It is very much surprising to observe that the concerning authorities in Dhaka have not taken any step or any alternative to address this issue.

Traffic Congestion
Almost two thirds of the population live in the outskirts of the mega city of Jakarta. The people living in the outskirts of the mega city of Jakarta have to commute to the center of the city for their needs. In the center of the mega city of Jakarta there are school, college, restaurants, hospitals, parks, cinema halls, supermarkets and other necessary places where people need to go for their daily lives, all of them are situated in the center. Unless there are reliable, accessible and affordable public transportation modes that connect the center and the outskirts of the mega city of Jakarta.

Primary Growth Machine
As long as Jakarta remains the primary growth machine of Indonesia, the economic growth of Jakarta will be strongly associated with the pace of Indonesia’s economic growth and will correspond to the rapid urbanization in Jakarta. Rapid urbanization will slow down the economic growth of Jakarta which will slow down the economic growth of Indonesia. Similar situation prevails in Dhaka as the city is the primary growth machine of Bangladesh. Dhaka is experiencing one of the highest rates of urbanization in the world. Over the years the city has had inconsistent transformation of land use and organic development which in turn created a crisis in residential areas or neighbourhoods and affected the city’s life adversely. Bureaucratic problems, political influence, lack of implementation, poor supervision and monitoring system are continuously creating problems for the citizens.

Pollutions
Dhaka city’s common problems are increase in water pollution, traffic congestion, air pollution, noise pollution, solid waste disposal, black smoke and poisonous gas etc. Jakarta’ water, air, noise etc pollution, which are widely reported in the international media, are also making the city unlivable and prompting the government to relocate the capital to Borneo. Even an Indonesian court ruled that President Joko Widodo and other top officials have been negligent in tackling air pollution in Jakarta as life expectancy, according to US researchers, is being reduced by 5.5 years.

Jakarta and Dhaka remain on the same plain when there are inadequate and conventional drainage systems. With low capacity to carry waste and gravity, sands and soils blocking drainage systems, absence of inlets and outlets, shortage of proper preservation of existing drainage systems are accounted for the prime cause of blockage in drainage systems, encroachment of rivers and canals by influential and water logging.

In addition, seasonal effects and topography are also causing water logging. The storm water becomes polluted as it mixes with solid waste, clinical waste, silts, contaminants, domestic waste and other human activities that increase the water borne diseases in these cities. Those people walking in the knee deep waste water then they become ill with waterborne diseases like typhoid, diarrhea, hepatitis, cholera, scabies, amebiasis, campylobacteriosis, and many other water borne diseases.

Two cities of Trash
Both cities have almost similar waste management system— collect–transport–dispose. Dhaka alone produces around 5000 metric tonnes of trash whereas Jakarta, which is half of Dhaka in terms of population but double in size, produces over 7000 metric tonnes of trash. Despite having specific locations for dumping the waste unscrupulous citizens throw a banana peel or a plastic waste which is a great environmental concern for the city corporations.