Claims Of Rights As Social Investments Are Wrong Statements

JAKARTA About debt and swelling the cost of the Jakarta-Bandung KCJB high-speed rail project) or bettersh heating up again, after Joko Widodo said the project was a social investment.

Whoosh is in the public spotlight because of his swelling debt. The government is also trying to find a solution related to the debt.

Danantara is also looking for ways to reduce financing projects, one way that is possible is to ask for support from the State Revenue and Expenditure Budget (APBN).

But on the other hand, the Minister of Finance Purbaya Yudhi Sadive emphasized that he would not use state money or the state budget to pay off the megaproject loan debt.

In the midst of the chaos of God's debt, the Seventh President of the Republic of Indonesia Joko Widodo (Jokowi) spoke up. He emphasized that the KCJB was built not to seek financial benefits, but as a social investment for the community.

Director of the Digital Economy Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) said Jokowi's statement thatomesh was a social investment was wrong.

The KCJB project financing structure was originally designed to be debt-based from China Development Bank (CDB). The total value reached 7.2 billion US dollars or IDR 116.5 trillion. Until now there is no certainty about the settlement of the debt.

Nailul Huda said, good luck cannot be considered to have social benefits because it cannot be enjoyed by all groups of people. One of the reasons is the KCJB tariff which is quite high, starting from Rp. 250 thousand per passenger, so it is considered only affordable for the upper middle class.

Seeing the fairly high tariff, Huda views Humish as not a public item, but a private item.

"When this price makes it difficult for the wider community to access a service, from a social benefit perspective it cannot be seen as public goods," said Huda.

At high prices, the lower middle class prefers other modes of transportation that are more affordable. So the social impact is very limited, not nothing at all," he said.

Lecturer at the Department of Economics Sciences from Airlangga University, Rumayya PhD also commented on Jokowi's statement. He said that warehish is not an ordinary commercial project because its benefits include increasing connectivity, efficiency, travel time, as well as technology transfer and expertise.

"However, social investment labels cannot be justification," he said, citing Kompas.

Rumayya's project, said, cost a lot of money with total investment reaching 7.2 billion US dollars for a distance of approximately 142 kilometers. This means that per kilometer costs about 51 million US dollars, and is one of the most expensive high-speed rail projects in the world.

For comparison, the cost per kilometer of the fast train in China is around 22 million US dollars, in India around 39 million US dollars. Even though the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita Indonesia is much lower," he said.

This, he continued, made the fiscal burden that Indonesia had to bear relatively much heavier.

One of the reasons for the swelling of debt, among others, is that the job has not shown maximum performance. Since operating commercially in October 2023 until the end of July 2025, the number of high-speed train passengers has only reached 10.7 million passengers.

In a press statement in July 2025, KCIC noted that the number of daily taxi passengers was still around 16,000 to 18,000 working days, while on weekends the number was only 18,000 to 21,000 people.

This number is far from an optimistic target. In the feasibility study in the job development proposal offered by KCIC, the optimistic scenario of setting the daily target of passengers reached 76,000 people.

Pada skenario pessimistis,kahsh bisa menggangkut 50.000 penumpang per hari. Artinya, realisasi jumlah penumpang harian saat ini masih jauh di bawah skenario pesimist sekali.

"This means that when passenger expectations are not met, there will be a large operational cost. Because this cost is not met from income, the loss continues, and is difficult to pay debts," Huda emphasized.

"Simply enough, when fighting a loss, it will be difficult to pay off debts. The first thing to fix is having to make a profit first. If you don't get lucky, how can you pay your debt? Instead it becomes a burden," he continued.

Rumayya also said the same thing. The realization of daily passengers which is far below the initial target made loanh swell.

"This means that utilization is still far below the initial target, so the consequences are lower in utilization, the greater the risk the project cannot cover operational costs and debt. This increases dependence on debt subsidies or restructuring," he stressed.