The Distribution Of Kemendikbud's Free Internet Quota Is Deemed Disproportionate

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JAKARTA - The Ministry of Education and Culture (Kemendikbud) provides students and educators with free internet quota to support online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the Secretary General of the Federation of Indonesian Teachers' Unions (FSGI) Heru Purnomo assessed that the distribution of internet quota is not proportional.

"In my opinion, there is no definite measure or calculation regarding the need for internet quota for the public or for studying. The distribution of the general quota and the study quota is not proportional," Heru said in his statement, Monday, September 28.

According to Heru, the basis for this assessment is because there are a number of learning applications that are deemed ineffective. This is because the application is not widely downloaded, when viewed from application distribution services such as Google Playstore.

The first application under suspicion was named Aminin which was used to study Islam. Judging from the Google Playstore as of September 26, 2020, the application has only been downloaded 1,000 times.

The next thing that was suspected was an application called AyoBelajar. This software has just been downloaded 5,000 times.

Then the Birru application was downloaded only 100 times. Then, the Eduka application was updated on October 29 and only downloaded 1,000 times. In addition, there is Ganeca Digital which is only downloaded 1,000 times.

"It should be suspected that there are efforts by the Ministry of Education and Culture to direct the use of certain applications that will provide financial benefits for application development companies," Heru explained.

If this application is not used by students and educators, Heru predicts that there is 15 GB of free internet quota for each student which will be forfeited along with the expiration of the active quota period.

Heru then calculated the quota amount to rupiah. If 1 GB equals IDR 1,000, then the quota budget for one student will be forfeited as much as IDR 15 thousand.

Currently, there are 26 million educational units whose cellphone numbers are active and valid and have downloaded the Absolute Responsibility Statement (SPTJM). If calculated, IDR 15 thousand multiplied by 26 million, there will be a minimum loss of IDR 399 billion.

"This quota assistance is given for 4 months. If multiplied, the total potential loss from the Ministry of Education and Culture reaches Rp1.78 trillion. This means that 25 percent of the budget is wasted from the total internet quota expenditure of Rp. 7.2 trillion," he explained.

For information, internet quota assistance is divided into general quota and study quota, where the general quota can be used to access all applications, while the learning quota can only be used for certain applications.

The general quota is 5 GB for all types of assistance for educators and students, while the rest is the study quota according to the volume of assistance provided. In the learning quota, there are 19 learning applications, 5 video conferencing, 22 websites, and 401 university websites.