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Jakarta's Pramuka Street intersection is well known for its essay-production services, as Indonesian universities continue to be dogged by the problem of ghostwritten essays. By paying a sum, a student can graduate without making much effort writing the final-year dissertation.

A graft watchdog in Indonesia has sounded a red alert for the education sector as it recorded some 40 cases of corruption in 2012, causing losses to the state of around Rp139 billion (US$14.4 million).

Anticorruption efforts are by no means a new concept in Indonesia. But since the 1950s, corruption has been mostly investigated and prosecuted, while preventative methods have been overlooked. A new collaboration involving more than 100 universities across the archipelago wants to change that.

Education agency officials denied a graft allegation in the distribution of funds from the central government and the city administration under the School Operational Aids and Education Operational Aids schemes.

The Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) says corruption in the education sector is still rampant and that the government must take action to stop the practices.The watchdog's coordinator for public services monitoring Ade Irawan told a press conference here Wednesday that corruption was commonplace throughout the republic's education institutions.

The Ministry of National Education of Indonesia proposed a bill to further deregulate the Nation's universities. But the privatization of leading universities will lead, according to the Indonesia Corruption Watch, to the exclusion of the children from less well-off families. The high costs of university entrance and passage in the way have indeed tended to either reduce or eliminate students from the poorer provinces of Indonesia. Major corruption cases break out in Indonesia on a regular basis and there is strong evidence that higher university tuition fees increased corruption in the sector.