Surabaya Mayor, Tri Rismaharini, has given a lecture opening the first course of study for students ot Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada on Tuesday (25/8) in Grha Sabha Pramana UGM. To the 3,000 new graduate students, Risma shared her experiences in developing the capital of East Java province in the past five years.
Risma lined out her programmes that have been implemented between 2010-2015. Apart from making Surabaya more orderly and pleasant to live with city parks and all, she has focused on the concept of clean city.
“I did not only develop the city in its physical aspects, but also human resource,” she said.
Risma said previously Surabaya had been known as a dirty, hot city with stubborn minded people. She had been trying to change that negative into a more positive image.
“In the past Surabaya was known for its negative image, hot, dirty, stubborned people, hooliganism, in addition to the big population of mosquitoes. These were the things that I tried to change to make Surabaya more pleasant to stay,” she explained.
In order to make her programmes work, she went down to the site, cleaning dirts and all the hard work. Every day she came to the kampongs to teach residents to maintain a clean surrounding.
“There are always a groom and a waste bin in my car. Each time I saw a dump of garbage, I went straight and clean it myself. The residents felt uneasy with this and finally came to help clean themselves,” she said.
In terms of public service, Risma makes good use of IT in everything, including security. “Don’t worry when you visit Surabaya, it’s a safe city with CCTVs on in 1,000 areas,” she said.
She further recounted the success for residents in developing organic agriculture themselves that is able to meet the need for vegetables in the city. There is also the programme that converted the prostitution area into a batik centre employing ex-workers there. Furthermore, she built over 1,000 libraries across the kampongs that have produced more outstanding children. Also, to face the ASEAN Economic Community 2015, she set up 12 free language centres as well as marketing training for small enterprises.
Risma said it was not easy to develop human resource, unlike building facilities that can be quickly completed.“Developing human resource is difficult, invincible, but this has to be done in order to build a better Indonesia,” she concluded.