East Kalimantan (Indonesian: ) is a province of Indonesia. Its territory comprises the eastern portion of Borneo. It had a population of about 3.03 million at the 2010 census (within the current boundary), 3.42 million at the 2015 census, and 3.766 million at the 2020 census; the official estimate as at mid 2022 was 3,859,783. (but see Note (b) below table under "Administrative divisions") Its capital is the city of Samarinda.
East Kalimantan has a total area of and is the second least densely populated province in Kalimantan. The majority of the region shares a maritime border to the east with West Sulawesi and Central Sulawesi; its Cape Mangkalihat separates the Makassar Strait from the Celebes Sea. Its former northernmost region was split off in October 2012 and is now North Kalimantan; meanwhile it still shares land border to the west with West Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan; to its south, East Kalimantan borders South Kalimantan. The province bordered Sabah before the split, but still borders Sarawak.
In December 2012, the existing West Kutai Regency was split in two, with the northwesternmost five districts forming a new Mahakam Ulu Regency. East Kalimantan is now divided into seven regencies and three cities. Isran Noor is the current governor of East Kalimantan and Hadi Mulyadi is its vice governor.
New national capital
The province will host the future capital city of Indonesia that will be built on the border of Kutai Kartanegara and Penajam North Paser regencies. The future capital is due to be named Nusantara, with construction originally projected to start in 2020, and intended to conclude in 2024. However, at a hearing before Committee V of Indonesia's House of Representatives on 9 June 2020, a government representative asserted that the government had not allocated the 2022 budget for the project (for 2022, the ministry proposed a budget worth over 100.46 trillion rupiah - over 7 billion US$ - a steep reduction from the figure of 149.81 trillion rupiah in 2021). Earlier, the National Planning Development Authority had said that the total sum needed to move the capital from its current location in Jakarta to East Kalimantan province amounted to 486 trillion rupiah, of which 265.2 trillion will be mobilised through the public-private partnership (PPP), 127.3 trillion from private special funds, and 93.5 trillion from the state budget. But the Ministry of Finance said that the government switched its priorities to mitigating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ministry announced that it had not allocated budget for the new capital project.
History
East Kalimantan was once mostly covered by tropical rainforest. In prehistoric times, there was limestone cave called Lubang Jeriji Saléh located in the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat Karst in the district of Bengalon, East Kutai, believed to contain one of the oldest figurative art in the world. The cave paintings were first spotted in 1994 by the French explorer Luc-Henri Fage and the French archaeologist Jean-Michel Chazine, from Kalimanthrope. In 2018, a team of scientists investigating the cave, led by Maxime Aubert from Griffith University and Pindi Setiawan from the Bandung Institute of Technology, published a report in the journal Nature identifying the paintings as the world's oldest known figurative art. The team had previously investigated cave paintings in the neighbouring island of Sulawesi. In order to date the paintings, the team used dating techniques on the calcium carbonate (limestone) deposits close to them.
