Jakarta. The UK said Monday that it was keeping an eye on Indonesia’s new capital city of Nusantara, and was open to see if opportunities for both countries to work together on the project might arise.

Indonesia’s capital relocation project from Jakarta to East Kalimantan is currently a work in progress. President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has always pitched to many countries that Nusantara would become a green and smart city. Jokowi dreams of having self-driving public transportation in Nusantara. Renewable energy is expected to power the new capital, and the city is also aiming for 100-percent digital connectivity for all its citizens as well as businesses.

When asked by the press if the UK was interested in helping Indonesia build this smart city, a British diplomat said that his country had already been observing the project's developments.

“We are talking and keeping an eye on what is currently happening in Nusantara, and whether there will be opportunities for further cooperation in the years to come,” British Chargé d'Affaires ad interim to Indonesia Matt Downing told reporters in Jakarta on Monday.

According to Downing, the UK has already partnered with Indonesia “on a broader sense of future cities”.

“For instance, on how we can make cities urbanize and ensure that the urbanization process is sustainable. Also [cooperation on] how will the cities be able to be resilient to climate change and so on, and where does new technology come into play. There are already quite a lot of UK investments, including government-sponsored projects,” Downing said.

About 80 percent of the funding for the capital relocation project will come from public-private partnerships and direct investment. State money will cover the remaining 20 percent of the costs.

The Nusantara Authority Body not long ago reported that it had attracted 270 letters of intent (LoIs) from potential investors. The agency did not go into details on how many British investors were in the mix. However, these LoIs mostly came from the ASEAN region and that would include Indonesia.

But what we know so far on smart city development is that the city’s authority body has signed a memorandum of understanding with French defense and tech giant Thales in July. The scope of cooperation with Thales includes the traffic management system of unmanned aircraft systems, as well as cybersecurity.

But generally speaking, British investment in Indonesia is on the rise. The total foreign direct investments (FDI) from the UK to Indonesia grew by almost twofold from $322.9 million in 2021 to $628.3 million in 2022, the government reported.

Earlier this year, President Jokowi met with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the margin of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan. Jokowi thanked Sunak for the $11 million grant that the UK had provided for Indonesia’s sustainable transport systems across several cities.

"Hopefully, [the UK] would expand the grants to other cities, including Nusantara," Jokowi said.

Nusantara Needs More Money for Smart City
Amid the UK currently observing the megaproject, the city's authority body recently tried to nudge the House of Representatives into approving a larger budget allocation for 2024. The body initially requested Rp 434 billion (around $28 million) for next year. Just last week, the authority agency asked if it could get an additional state budget of Rp 3.15 trillion. Some Rp 446 billion of the proposed budget will go to make Nusantara a smart city.

According to news outlet Antara, the Nusantara agency planned to use Rp 146 billion of the proposed smart city budget to develop the digital governance system. About Rp 169 billion of the money will go to intelligent transportation and mobility systems.

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