Jakarta, a metropolis renowned as the world's fastest-sinking city, continues to grapple with a critical challenge: millions of its residents still lack reliable access to clean, piped water. This ongoing crisis is intrinsically linked to the city's alarming land subsidence, with excessive groundwater extraction identified as the primary driver, causing parts of the city to sink by up to 15 centimeters annually. Some neighborhoods have subsided by as much as four meters since the 1970s, a stark reality that contributed to the controversial decision to build a new capital, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan.
In communities like Muara Angke, a fishing neighborhood on Jakarta's northern coast, water tankers are a frequent and essential sight. Residents emerge with hoses and containers, relying on these deliveries for basic needs. For families in these densely packed, impoverished areas, the municipal water utility, PAM JAYA, has yet to ensure consistent piped water access. Ellah, who runs a local water kiosk, highlighted the severity of the situation: "When the deliveries stop, life quickly becomes impossible. For seven days," she recalled, "people couldn't wash. They couldn't cook." Her community of about 200 families, living in wooden homes above tidal waters, has never been reached by municipal pipes. In response, Ellah established her own miniature distribution system in 2016, purchasing 8,000-liter tankers and selling water to approximately 15 neighboring households. This private solution comes at a significant cost, with families spending up to 600,000 rupiah ($33) monthly for water, a substantial portion of their average household salaries of 1.5 to 3 million rupiah ($80 to $160).
Reliable piped water is widely regarded as a crucial long-term solution to mitigate subsidence. The more households connected to the municipal network, the less need there is to drill wells into the aquifers beneath the city. However, for millions of Jakartans, this transition remains incomplete. Nearby, 68-year-old former fisherman Husnin also buys water instead of receiving it through pipes. His family spends around 40,000 rupiah ($2.20) every three days for washing and cooking, with drinking water purchased separately. These costs have become increasingly difficult to absorb as fish stocks decline and incomes shrink. "Access to water is our right as citizens," he stated. "And it is the responsibility of the government to provide it."
In Penjaringan, 46-year-old grandmother Sadiya lacks a piped connection. Her family relies on a hose connected to a nearby mosque, where groundwater is pumped into her home for 150,000 rupiah each month. When the pump fails, she must buy water from vendors, spending as much as 30,000 rupiah a day ($1.70)—a significant burden for a household that sometimes earns less than 1 million rupiah ($56) monthly. "I feel sad," she said. "Sometimes I'm late on the monthly payment because the money has to be divided for everything else."
In contrast, families in Rawabadan Selatan, just a few kilometers away, were connected to the municipal water network about two years ago. They previously relied on bore water, which was often too dirty for cooking, bathing, and cleaning due to seawater infiltration and pollution. "It is so much better," said Walimah of the piped supply. "Previously [the borehole water] made us itchy. We had to rinse again with [cleaner] water."
Jakarta's historical dependence on groundwater has created a vicious cycle. As groundwater is pumped from beneath the city, the land sinks. This subsidence causes underground pipes to crack and shift, allowing treated water to leak before it reaches customers. According to PAM JAYA, as much as 50 percent of Jakarta's treated water is lost through leakage, reducing the revenue needed to repair aging infrastructure and extend the network into underserved communities. This cycle—limited piped water driving groundwater extraction, which accelerates land subsidence, and subsidence further damaging the network—has persisted for decades.
Wahyu Kusuma Astuti, a lecturer at Universitas Tarumanagara who completed her PhD on Jakarta's water infrastructure, traces the roots of these problems back over a century to the Dutch colonial period. The original piped water network was built to serve European neighborhoods, leaving most native Indonesian communities without access from the outset. As Jakarta grew into one of the world's largest cities, the network never kept pace with its rapidly expanding population, leading vast areas to depend on groundwater.
In the 1990s, city leaders faced mounting pressure to expand water services. Rather than funding the investment themselves, the government turned to private operators. In 1997, under President Suharto, Jakarta's water system was divided between British utility Thames Water and France's Suez under long-term concession agreements. Although coverage was expected to reach almost 98 percent, critics argue these concessions led to decades of underperformance and a "governance void," as detailed in a 2026 research paper by Ade Hendraputra. Wealthier households, businesses, and government offices also abandoned the network, drilling their own groundwater wells, further reinforcing the problem.
Marwa, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, believes the underlying problem is that water has long been treated as an investment opportunity rather than a public service. "Water infrastructure has never been prioritized, and the responsibility to finance, historically speaking, has always been outsourced to external actors," she stated. The consequences are most visible in Jakarta's poorer neighborhoods, where households without connections often pay the highest prices for water from tankers and street vendors. Some families spend almost one-third of their income buying water, and intermittent supply forces residents, primarily women, to stay awake late into the night filling buckets whenever water begins flowing.
Following decades of complaints about poor service, high tariffs, and under-serviced low-income areas, a citizen lawsuit led to water services returning to public management in 2023. However, Marwa argues that many financial incentives remain unchanged, favoring "derisking private sector privatization" and predictable returns over universal household connections. Wahyu adds that while the public company PAM JAYA now operates the system, it remains tied to commercial arrangements from the previous model. Private companies continue to favor lower-risk investments like water treatment plants, while the public utility bears the enormous cost of replacing aging pipelines and purchasing treated bulk water, despite almost half of that water leaking before reaching customers. "They have to pay back for the bulk water supply," she says, even though "half of the water that they channel actually leaks."
Environmental organization WALHI argues that expanding pipelines alone will not solve Jakarta's water crisis. Muhammad Aminullah, executive director of WALHI Jakarta, stated that increasing household connections must be matched by reliable service and better water quality for residents to abandon groundwater. He noted that many households continue relying on alternative sources because they do not trust the public supply, suspecting poor water quality and inconsistent continuity. Aminullah also points out that the debate has focused too heavily on household groundwater use, overlooking the much larger volumes extracted by commercial users such as hotels and industries, advocating for stricter regulations on these sectors.
Aminullah asserts, "Water is a human right that should be fulfilled by the state, not by profit-oriented private entities," arguing that Jakarta's water system continues to prioritize market mechanisms over universal access. PAM JAYA, in a press release this month, stated that expanding access to safe piped water is its main goal and that it has accelerated investment since water services returned to full public control. The utility reported installing over 72,000 new household connections during 2025, raising coverage to approximately 82 percent of Jakarta's population. New treatment plants and distribution infrastructure are intended to reduce dependence on groundwater ahead of its goal of universal piped water access by 2029. Whether these ambitions can finally break Jakarta's dependence on groundwater and help slow the subsidence threatening the world's most-populous metropolitan area remains one of the defining challenges facing Indonesia's capital.
One of many communities in North Jakarta affected by the city’s subsidence and rising sea levels. (Photo by Michael Neilson)
