Indonesia’s dilemma in enabling 4.0
Categorized as a developing countries, Indonesia are pushing its maximum attempt to enabling 4th Industrial Revolution into its daily life of its people. Based on the Human Development Index, Indonesia is still in category of developing country, using four principal areas of examination used to rank countries: mean years of schooling, expected years of schooling, life expectancy at birth and gross national income per capita. This index makes it possible to follow changes in development levels over time and to compare the development levels of different countries. In economic terms, Indonesia has experienced significant economic growth in the last two decades, and its middle class continues to expand. Indonesia is now categorized as lower middle-income, and between 2009 and 2013 annual GDP growth was 5.8 percent. With a rising middle class expected to reach 135 million people by 2020, the country is challenged with widening inequality. Indonesia has more than 28 million people still living below the national poverty line and many more do not have access to basic social services. Large sections of the population lack access to basic services, with 68 percent — mainly those in urban centers — having access to safe drinking water, and 61 per cent to sanitation. Women continue to have lower access to education, employment and services. Relating to the fact and data which lead Indonesia to be categorized as developing country, affect into Indonesia serious attempt to enabling 4th industrial revolution. Several attemps had been done by the government of Indonesia under President Joko Widodo administration which is to issued a roadmap to planned out his administration attempt to allow and start enabling new industrial revolution into Indonesia. The roadmap that called Making Indoneisa 4.0 is a highlight of his administration, especially in Ministry of Manpower to produce a national capacity building. Another attempt by the government is to initiate an education and training program with United in Diversity (UID) and Tsinghua University in Taiwan to gather youth from Asia-Pacific countries anad train them to be prepared facing the 4th industrial revolution, that program called Collective Creative Learning and Action for Sustainable Solution (Co-CLASS) in 2017 . By those attempts, Indonesia are moving forward on providing Agents of Change that aims to accelerate the Industry 4.0 transition within the country.
Yet to achieve the ambitious goals, some challenges and obstacles are still faced by Indonesian government either from internal or external Indonesia. But mostly, the factors affected by the current Indonesia category as developing country is the internal factors, they are : human resources, capital, and digital infrastructure. The readiness of human resources in Indonesia are counted as low, according to the Manpower Ministry data, Indonesia is dominated by unskilled labour with 60.24% rather than the skilled labour with the bachelor degree. By the data shown above proven that education played a vital part on shaping a country’s development, moreover on the shifting age from physical into digital things. Innovation are not likely to be enhanced; the absence of research and development (R&D) environment is obvious, edocuation in Indoensia aren’t always allow the students to thinking beyond the textbox that they’ll assume as a defiant act towards norms and rules applied.
The tight budget on education were effected by the absence of investment, especially in order to facilitate the industrial advancement which requires a high-technologies that will need a huge capital. Indonesia facing a diverse source of economic growth that caused a difficulty in luring investors. A new investment policy are indeed important to be draft amidst the high competitiveness among emerging economy countries. Another challenge faced by the Indonesian government is the constraint of digital infrastructure, the average cellular phones in Indonesia still using the 4G technology and not ready yet for 5G technology. The average speed of fiber optics is also less than 10 Mbps. In addition, cloud infrastructure is also still limited. Also, unreliable logistics has caused the nation’s ecommerce growth to fall behind expectations. To catch up the infrastructure lag, the government build the Palapa Ring project that will provide a backbone for a national information superhighway. This project is part of the universal service obligation to ensure the telecommunication and informatics access for the public. Furthermore, the government is also speeding up the High Throughout Satellite (HTS) project aimed to bring internet access to the remote area. However, the satellite is expected to launch at the end of 2021 or at the beginning of 2022, after receive a US$400 million funding from the World Bank to improve the digital infrastructure.
Thus, in order to tackling and find the loopholes of challenges face by Indonesia,the government need to enhance its involvement in regional attempt in enabling Industry 4.0 a by enacting the current joint training with several universities in Southeast Asian in Co-CLASS, and also to initiate a camp or a conference open for all millenial to accelerate their prior knowledge in technology and innovation within Asia Pacific region where some countries with better technology advancement like People’s Republic of China, Japan and South Korea could lead the training for technology and advancement as to prepare youth to implement the training into their countries and make Industry 4.0 possible.
