Government firmly committed to land certification completion by 2024: Jokowi

Jakarta, The Gulf Observer: The Indonesian government will complete the issuance of land certificates for estimated six million plots remaining by 2024, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) stated.

“For next year, we have around six million plots of land that have not been certified. We will work hard to certify them all,” the president noted at a handover ceremony of land certificates in Sidoarjo, East Java, on Wednesday.

However, Jokowi was open to the possibility of resolving the matter up until 2025.

“At least in 2025, all the land in Indonesia will already be certified,” he remarked.

According to the president, some 126 million plots of land had to be certified in 2015, with only 46 million plots certified and 80 million plots uncertified.

At that time, the National Land Agency (BPN) could only issue 500 thousand land certificates per year, so completing certificates for 80 million plots of land was estimated to take 160 years.

Widodo’s administration then aggressively pushed for the completion of land certification throughout Indonesia until only six million plots of land were estimated to had not yet been certified.

At the land certificate handover ceremony in Sidoarjo, the president gave away more than three thousand land certificates from the categories of asset redistribution/agrarian reform and complete systematic land registration (PTSL).

He also conveyed the importance of owning a land certificate as proof of legal rights to the land owner and for preventing land conflicts.

The completion of certificates that had been carried out so far was through cooperation between the district, provincial, and central BPN, he stated.

The head of state advised people keen on using their land certificate as collateral at the bank to ensure that they can pay interest of the loan.

He did not want the land certificates that had been given to be confiscated by the bank, as the land owners were unable to pay the loan interest.

“I do not want this land certificate to be confiscated by the bank. We want this land certificate to be able to bring welfare to our community,” he emphasized.