INDONESIA’S president announced Monday that the country’s capital will move from overcrowded, sinking and polluted Jakarta to a site in sparsely populated East Kalimantan province on Borneo island, known for rainforests and orangutans.

President Joko Widodo said intense studies over the past three years had resulted in the choice of the location on the eastern side of Borneo.

The new capital city, which has not yet been named, will be in the middle of the vast archipelagic nation and already has relatively complete infrastructure because it is near the cities of Balikpapan and Samarinda, Widodo said.

He said the burden has become too heavy on Jakarta on Java island as the center of government, finance, business, trade and services as well as the location of the country’s largest airport and seaport.

Widodo said the decision was made not to move the capital elsewhere on Java because the country’s wealth and people are highly concentrated there and should be spread out.

Currently, 54 percent of the country’s nearly 270 million people live on Java, the country’s most densely populated area.

“We couldn’t continue to allow the burden on Jakarta and Java island to increase in terms of population density,” Widodo said at a news conference.

Widodo said he wants to separate the center of government from the country’s business and economic center in Jakarta.

Jakarta is an archetypical Asian mega-city with 10 million people, or 30 million including those in its greater metropolitan area.

Widodo said the relocation of the capital to a 180,000-hectare site will take up to a decade and cost up to 466 trillion rupiah (US$32.5 billion), of which 19 percent will come from the state budget and the rest will be funded by cooperation between the government and business entities and by direct investment by state companies and the private sector.  (SD-Agencies)