Tanjungriau Overseas Park Completed, New Batam Tourism Icon
About Overseas Park
The project to build a marine park in Kampung Tua Tanjungriau, Sekupang, Batam City continues to be rushed. The Batam City Government targets the project to be completed in June 2021.
This project, which began work last year, is funded by two budget sources. The first is from the APBN amounting to IDR 15 billion and the second is the Batam City APBD amounting to IDR 1.562 billion.
According to the master plan, there will be two views that can be seen from the sea park, namely residents’ houses on platforms and the open sea with a number of islands. In this area, visitors can also see sea eagles flying low.
Batam Mayor H Muhammad Rudi wants the project in Tanjungriau to be completed according to plan. He wants to turn the old village in Batam into a tourism area.
“Old villages must be free from slums, so we hope the community can also protect the environment and not throw rubbish carelessly,” said Rudi when visiting the project site, Sunday (9/5/21).
According to Rudi, the park, whose basic building is a platform that connects residents’ houses at sea level, will soon become a new tourism icon in Batam City.
City Without Slums Program
The project to build a park above the sea in Kampung Tua Tanjungriau was built through the City Without Slums (Kotaku) program. It is a strategic program of the Directorate General of Human Settlements, Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing.
The Kotaku program is intended to accelerate the handling of slum settlements in Indonesia and support the 100-0-100 Movement, namely 100 percent universal access to drinking water, 0 percent slum settlements, and 100 percent access to adequate sanitation.
Since the program was carried out in Batam, the Batam City Government immediately prepared a Detailed Engineering Design (DED), and even lobbied the PUPR Ministry to help with the construction budget. Rudi is sure that in the future Kampung Tua Tanjungriau will become one of the new tourist destinations in Batam, even Riau Islands Province.
He is also optimistic that the construction of a park on the sea will become a pilot project for the City Without Slums (Kotaku) program of the Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (PUPR).
“So the history is that the Batam City Government proposed to the PUPR Ministry that Kampung Tua Tanjungriau could be used as a pilot project for the Kotaku program,” he said.
Initiated since 2018
The arrangement of Kotaku has been planned since 2018. Then work was carried out in 2019. At the beginning of 2020, this project was temporarily stopped due to the impact of the spread of Covid-19, but was finally completed in 2021.
The Kotaku project is also part of the Batam City Government’s efforts to complete 37 Old Village points in Batam City. Tanjungriau Old Village is one of the old villages whose residents have received ownership certificates.
“So this process is long and this is also a promise from both of us (along with the Deputy Mayor of Batam, Amsakar Achmad) to resolve the old village problem,” said Rudi.
For this reason, his party deeply regrets the one-sided claims from a number of groups regarding the construction of Kotaku in Tanjungriau. The reason is that from the start only the Batam City Government proposed development in Tanjungriau.
“If today someone claims to be fighting for it, I will also be confused. When to fight for it. “Because from planning to proposing to the PUPR Ministry, everything is done by the Batam City Government,” he said.
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