Heru Budi Denies Cutting KJMU's Budget: DKI Regional Government Can Still Finance Student Brothers

JAKARTA - Acting Governor of DKI Jakarta Heru Budi Hartono denied that he had cut his budget for the Jakarta Superior Student Card (KJMU) program in the 2024 APBD.

This is in response to the statement of the DKI Jakarta DPRD which stated that the chaos of deleting thousands of student names from the list of KJMU recipients was due to the cut budget.

"There is no (budget cuts). This means that the DKI Regional Government can still finance these (students)," said Heru after inviting KJMU recipients at DKI Jakarta City Hall, Thursday, March 7.

The head of the Presidential Secretariat also denied that there was a reduction in the quota for KJMU recipients from around 19 thousand to 7,900 people.

"Right, there is no quota," he replied.

For information, the problem of removing thousands of student names occurred due to changes in the data on KJMU recipients for phase 1 of 2024. The DKI Provincial Government uses a new mechanism in the use of data sources.

The source of data on the determination of KJMU recipients that students had complained about was the Integrated Social Welfare Data (DTKS) which was approved by the Ministry of Social Affairs.

Then, the data is matched with data from the Socio-Economic Registration (Regsosek) issued by the Ministry of National Development Planning/National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas).

The matching of DTKS with Regsosek is carried out to find out the ranking of welfare (desil). The decil categories that are still included in the criteria as recipients of educational assistance are very poor (desil 1), poor (desil 2), almost poor (desil 3), and vulnerable to poverty (desil 4).

Meanwhile, KJMU recipient students who are now set to fall into the 5-10 decile category or who are considered to be able to be removed from the list of recipients of social assistance for education costs.

The problem is that many underprivileged students are set to be included in the 5-10 decile, so they are removed from the KJMU list of recipients.

Finally, Heru Budi decided to re-enter the data on KJMU recipients who had previously been crossed out. Even though the student data was re-entered, Heru emphasized that his party would continue to re-check to determine the feasibility of the recipients of the social assistance for education costs.

The feasibility check for receiving the assistance includes a field survey regarding the socio-economic conditions concerned, synchronizing data on ownership of assets and vehicles, as well as improving welfare rankings (desils) which are appropriate benchmarks for the KJMU to be given.

Previously, the Chairman of Commission E of the DKI Jakarta DPRD, Iman Satria, said that the DKI Provincial Government had reduced the budget for the distribution of KJMU assistance. This, according to Iman, led to the elimination of many student names as recipients of assistance amounting to Rp9 million per semester.

"The budget (KJMU) is limited, in 2024 it is much lower. This year it was Rp180 billion, while last year it was Rp360 billion. This decreased by half. Finally, the provincial government took the benefit from poverty," said Iman.