Indonesia's Eight-Year Development Plan

Abstract

THE INDONESIAN NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL, known in Djakarta as DEPERNAS (short for Dewan Perantiang Nasional), was established by a decree of President Sukarno after he formed his presidential cabinet in July i959. The Council was sworn in on August I5, i959, and instructed to draft a development plan in the shortest possible time. The President specifically requested that it should deal with social and cultural, as well as economic development, and he also instructed the Council to define and apply in the course of its work the concept of socialism which he had himself defined only in a general way. He appointed as chairman of the Council a well-known member of the Nationalist old guard, Professor H. Muhammad Yamin. A former Minister of Justice, Yamin is best known in Indonesia as a poet and a romantic historian who has glorified the Indonesian race and claimed for it in some of his writings territories ranging from Madagascar to the South Pacific. Appointed as Secretary-General was a distinguished civil servant, Mr. M. Hutasoit, for several years the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Education and largely responsible for the development of public education in Indonesia since independence. The 74 members of the Council were chosen by President Sukarno more on the basis of political considerations than on grounds of technical ability. When the list of members was announced in i959, there was considerable skepticism in Djakarta that such a Council could produce a plan, but the group worked very fast, adopting a procedure of closure without voting after short debates, and by August i960 the Eight-Year Plan had been drafted. It was then submitted to the Cabinet for discussion in late October 1960. Comments made by some of the Cabinet members were never really answered by Mr. Yamin, who as chairman of DEPERNAS was also an ex-officio member of the Cabinet. In accordance with a favorite notion of the present regime, that the specifically Indonesian way of decision-making is by consensus, he declared at the end of the three Cabinet sessions concerned with the Plan that everybody seemed to be in agreement, disregarding criticisms by Cabinet members who challenged the planners' assumptions on sources of revenue and suggested an alternative schedule of investments amounting to about half of what DEPERNAS had proposed. Yamin then had the Plan prepared for