President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are expected to witness the signing of an agreement on a joint study of the Jakarta-Surabaya semi-high-speed railway next week.
Abe will visit Indonesia next week and the signing will be a step forward to cement a vital role for Japan in several giant infrastructure projects across the archipelago.
The deal on the $7.8 billion railway would be the first of several projects worth billions of dollars, which Japan and Indonesia will undertake under a public-private partnership scheme involving state-owned and private companies from both countries.
Other projects include the $3 billion Patimban deepsea port in West Java, a $487 million project to electrify and double the number of lanes to four on the railway line connecting Manggarai Station in Central Jakarta and Cikarang, an industrialized area in West Java.
"We are expecting that a preliminary agreement will be signed between the Ministry of Transportation and JICA [Japan International Cooperation Agency]," Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan said on Wednesday (04/01).
Japanese Transport Minister Keiichi Ishii visited Patimban Port and met with his Indonesian counterpart Budi Karya Sumadi last week to finalize talks on the projects.
Japan has been keen to secure transportation projects after losing out to the Chinese in 2015 for the contract to build Indonesia's first high-speed railway linking Jakarta and Bandung, West Java.
Source : The Jakarta Globe
