Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Indonesia needs up to 175,000 engineers per annum to implement its Master Plan on Acceleration and Expansion of its (Indonesia`s) Economic Development (MP3EI), an Indonesian Engineers Association (PII) executive said.

"We need an additional 175,000 engineers every year to implement the MP3EI scheme and to bring Indonesia into the big ten of the world`s powers in 2030," PII Secretary General Heru Dewanto said here on the sidelines of a national seminar on the acceleration of infrastructure development.

He said that at present the number of Indonesian engineers was only increasing by 37,000 per annum.

The launching of the MP3EI scheme was conducted with the inauguration of 17 large-scale projects worth Rp190 trillion in six Indonesian economic corridors, which were part of a series of projects worth Rp4,000 trillion until 2014.

He expressed doubts that the country`s education system would be able to produce the required number of engineers.

The sanctioning of borderless mobility for engineers within the ASEAN region by the ASEAN summit recently would enable foreign engineers to flood the country.

Therefore, Indonesian human resources should be able to compete with foreign ones whose quality was possibly better, he said.

In the face of the possibility of Indonesia being flooded by foreign engineers who are not qualified and competent, Heru said that Indonesia needed to regulate it with legal provisions.

"We have to anticipate it with the issuance of a law or regulations to protect our consumers using the services of engineers," he said.

The law, he said, is needed to create engineers who are competent in their respective fields and who could be taken into granted in the legal aspect. It is also needed to create international standard engineers who are able to compete globally.

(SYS/A014/S012)

Editor: Suryanto
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