Government Plan To Distribute Pertalite Subsidy Constrained By Data Problems

Illustration. (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - The government through the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs (Kemenko Ekonomi) together with the Ministry of Finance (Kemenkeu) and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources along with the Ministry of SOEs is working on a scheme for distributing Pertalite fuel compensation to the public.

Previously, the President Commissioner of PT Pertamina suggested providing Pertalite subsidies directly to beneficiaries in order to reduce the use of Premium fuel types.

In response to this, Energy Watch Executive Director Mamit Setiawan said that the Pertalite subsidy scheme could not be used for the scheme of people or beneficiaries due to limited data owned by the government.

"One of the obstacles faced is data problems. Currently, the data on people who need subsidies are still not firm," said Mamit to VOI, Thursday, February 3.

He said that the data in the Ministry of Social Affairs is different from data belonging to other institutions such as the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) and data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) so that Pertamina and the government will experience difficulties in distributing subsidies to the public.

"It's the same as the closed subsidy scheme for 3kg LPG which has not been implemented. So I think it's better as it is now and must be realized immediately if we don't want Pertamina to suffer a significant loss," he appealed.

This is not much different from what was previously stated by the Director General of Electricity at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Rida Mulyana, who also complained about the absence of data from the Ministry of Social Affairs so that his party had not been able to distribute electricity subsidies according to the target recipients.

He said his party had requested data from the Ministry of Social Affairs twice. However, his party has not received the latest data and is still holding data as of October 2020.