YOGYAKARTA – One achievement has recently been made by students of Universitas Gadjah Mada. This time students joining the Gama Team, consisting of Traheka Erdyas Bimanatya (Economics), Rahmatdi (Accounting) and Poppy Laksita Rini (Management) Faculty Economics and Business UGM class 2010, won the second place in the 1st MRC’s Bachelor Journey, taking place from 3-4 October 2012 at UI. The first competition to be organised is a cooperation between University of Indonesia’s Faculty of Economics and the Bank of Indonesia.
According to Traheka, initially the competition was joined by as many as 120 student teams from various universities across Indonesia, which then selected 90 teams who were given the assignment to resolve three economic issues, namely: Bank Pembangunan Daerah (BPD), inflation and credibility of the Bank of Indonesia.
“We did it in our own campus: UGM had to work on the BPD case,” Traheka said on Tuesday (16/10).
Traheka said that of the 90 teams, 18 were selected to go to the final round. Each team presented their work to the jury from the Bank of Indonesia, UI, Perbanas and banking institutions. The Gama Team had the theme of research, To Optimise the Function of BPD bank as Agent of Regional Development.
The research supervised by Muhammad Edhie Purnawan, MA., Ph.D observed that the optimalisation of the BPD as Agent of Regional Development was due to the BPD internal barrier and SMEs. Therefore, the Bank of Indonesia policy should be directed not only towards the supply side but also the demand side on credit requests from SMEs.
Besides, the BPD capacity to become an enterprise for giving guarantee on Regional Credit (PPKD), Traheka said, needs to be reconsidered as characteristically, BPD and PPKD have differences in terms of status and company nature.
“The alternative to reinforce the BPD role in distributing productive credit is the concept of Public Private Partnership with BPD serving as private party and PPKD serving as public party,” said the student who was born in Denpasar, 21 June 1992.
Gama Team also considered that the responsibility to train BPD and SMEs should not only be done by the Bank of Indonesia or the regional government, but also academics and the central government to make the benefit bigger.”