VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Rural development becomes one of the national priorities as listed in the nine-priority development program-Nawacita. To support the national development program, the Central Bureau of Statistics –BPS will conduct a Data Collection on villages’ potential –Podes from 2nd to 31^st of May 2018. Podes is a data collection on infrastructure, social and economic potentials owned by each village / sub-district, and district /city throughout Indonesia. Head of the Central Bureau of Statistics, Kecuk Suharyanto said that Podes is aimed at creating data of villages’ potential, village typology, updated source data of working area of ​​statistical data and basic information for the Population Census 2020. On the socialization of Podes 2018 in Jakarta on Thursday (April 19), Kecuk explained that the data collection can measure the effectiveness of village fund policies which have been conducted by the government since 2015.

“We cover all villages and sub-districts. We visit almost 82 thousands one on one. From there, we can see how many villages are shifted, left behind or developed and then become independent. The second, we will later make a model how the impact of village funds is towards economic growth and the quality of human life. Because if we talk about development targets and development funds, it's not just economic aspect. The quality of human life is important,” Kecuk Suharyanto said.

Suhariyanto further said the villages’ potential -Podes will be used as a reference for changes in urban and rural classification. Podes data plays a major role in the allocation of village funds, as the basic data of village development evaluation. Based on BPS data related to Podes, Ministries and Agencies can also develop geographic difficulties indexes that are important indicators in allocating village funds. The government is very serious to deal with rural and suburban development by disbursing a lot of village funds. From this Podes data, village development index can also be carried out and it divides the villages into independent, developing and disadvantaged villages. The government is targeting 5,000 disadvantaged villages to become developing villages and 2,000 developing villages to become independent ones. (VOI/SEKAR/RHM)