The Indonesian Transmigration Program in Historical Perspective
| Published date | 01 October 1988 |
| Author | J. Hardjono |
| Date | 01 October 1988 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1988.tb00662.x |
The Indonesian Transmigration Program
in Historical Perspective
J. HARDJONO*
INTRODUCTION
From the earliest times the Indonesian archipelago has been characterized by an
extremely unbalanced distribution of population. When the most recent census was
taken in 1980, the island of Java had 61.9 per cent of Indonesia’s population
on
less than
7
per cent of the country’s land, which represented only a small decrease
on
the figure of
64.9 per cent recorded in the 196
1
Population
Census.
It is not surprising, therefore, that
the planned transfer of people from Java has long been a part of government policies.
This concept of government-assisted population redistribution, to which the name
transmigration was given soon after independence in 1945, has become
so
firmly
established not only in national-level policies but also in community views of Indonesia’s
existence as a nation, that its role has rarely been questioned. In fact, as a consequence of
its numerical achievements, the Indonesian transmigration program has been described
as ‘a social engineering project of monumental proportions
-
the largest voluntary land
settlement scheme in the world’ (Arndt 1983, 50). But since 1984 there has been growing
criticism of the program, which many people now tend to describe as a failure for one
reason
or
another.
The purpose of this paper
is
to look at what has been achieved by the transmigration
program, to examine the major problems that have arisen and to consider the present
constraints which
now
cast some doubt upon the future ofthe program. Only the program
conducted by the Directorate-General of Transmigration (which was elevated to a
Department of Transmigration in 1983) will be considered. Resettlement projects
established by the Department of Social Welfare and the Armed Forces are outside the
scope of the paper.
GOVERNMENT POLICIES
The
1905-1968
period
Although the term ‘transmigration’ has been a familiar one
for
many years, planned
population resettlement in Indonesia did not commence only in 1950, when the
*
Senior
Lecturer, Padjadjaran
University,
Bandung (Indonesia).
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