Balerejo District: Rivers and Roads of Madiun Regency

Balerejo district is the north-western rice belt of Madiun Regency, a flat plain of eighteen villages that reaches the Ngawi boundary on its northern side and lies just west of Caruban, the regency’s administrative town. Two national roads cross it, two small rivers drain it, and one of the regency’s porang processing plants stands in its village of Kuwu. Behind that plain-country description is a patchwork of hamlets whose names, from Kedungmuni to Puntuk Mlati, give a good picture of how the land is lived on.

Balerejo District in Northern Madiun Regency

Within Madiun Regency, Balerejo is the district that borders Ngawi Regency in the north. The regency’s capital, Caruban, lies to the east. Balerejo is lowland throughout, and most of the land is rice field.

Its neighbours can be named from the surrounding districts’ own descriptions. To the north and west lie three districts of Ngawi Regency: Karangjati, Pangkur and Kwadungan. Each of them names Balerejo as its eastern neighbour. On the eastern side the Pilangkenceng district touches it, and Wonoasri and the regency’s own Madiun district, which is a separate unit from the city, lie to the south and east. Pilangkenceng lists Balerejo to its south, Wonoasri lists it to its north, and Madiun district lists it on its northern and eastern edges.

Eighteen Villages and Their Hamlets

All eighteen units are villages. The hamlets under each are listed below, and they show how varied the pattern is. Kedungrejo, in particular, has seven hamlets, while Tapelan is a single unit.

The word kedung, meaning a deep pool in a river, begins many of these names: Kedungmuni, Kedungsemak, Kedungjati, Kedungpelem, Kedungrejo, Kedunggalih, Kedungpung and Kedung Meneng. Eight hamlet names begin with that word, and the rivers described below are the reason such names are common here. Two other names, Puntuk Mlati in Kedungrejo and Puntukan in Sogo, use the Javanese word for a small rise in the ground, which stands out in country this flat.

The Jeroan and Muneng Rivers

Two streams run across Balerejo from east to west. The Kali Muneng follows the northern edge and forms the boundary with Ngawi Regency. The Kali Jeroan runs through the middle of the district. Both are tributaries of the Kali Madiun, which carries their water to the Bengawan Solo at the city of Ngawi. The Madiun River page follows that main stream, and the great river it joins is the Bengawan Solo.

For the farming villages, the Jeroan matters most, because it collects runoff from upstream districts. In January 2022 heavy rain fell through a day across the catchment, and the Jeroan overflowed with water from upstream villages in Saradan, Mejayan and Pilangkenceng. Water reached the houses of Jerukgulung before dawn the next morning, flooding about eighty homes in two neighbourhood units and keeping children away from school. Residents said that flooding follows whenever heavy rain falls upstream, and they regard it as a yearly problem.

The upstream districts that send water down the Jeroan include Saradan and Mejayan.

Two National Roads and the Caruban Junction

Balerejo is crossed by two national roads. One runs east to west and links Surabaya, Caruban and Madiun city, so almost all road traffic between the regency’s capital and the city passes through the district. A second road, from Ngawi toward Caruban, runs along the border with Pilangkenceng near the villages of Kuwu and Simo.

Public institutions along these roads include the district office, the regency prosecutor’s office, a vehicle registration service point and the regency’s health laboratory, and community health centres operate in both Balerejo and Simo. Balerejo market is the district’s trading centre, and a kindergarten run by the village exists in almost every one of the eighteen villages.

Kuwu and the Porang Plant

Porang, the tuber from which konjac flour is made, has become one of Madiun Regency’s most talked-about crops. Farmers in the hill districts grow it, dry it in slices, and sell it for processing. Three processing plants are now operating or being built in the regency, and one of them stands in Kuwu village in Balerejo, near the road to Ngawi. The others are in Wungu and in Saradan.

The district itself is lowland and mostly rice country, so the plant mainly serves as a place of work and a destination for tubers grown elsewhere in the regency. The regent has asked that the investors in these plants buy from local farmers first and hire from nearby communities.

Across the Ngawi Boundary

The three Ngawi districts on Balerejo’s northern and western flank are all at the far south-eastern end of their regency. Karangjati is the easternmost district of Ngawi Regency, about twenty kilometres east of Ngawi town. The trans-provincial route that links Surabaya, Ngawi and Solo without passing through Madiun city begins at the traffic light in Caruban and runs north through Karangjati. Kwadungan sits at the south-eastern tip of Ngawi Regency, some twenty-one kilometres from Ngawi town, and most of its people work as farm labourers. Pangkur lies roughly twelve kilometres from Ngawi town and became a district in 1982, in the same round of reorganisation that created Wonoasri and Sawahan on the Madiun side.

Together these districts show that the boundary is administrative rather than visible. The plain, the crops and the road continue unbroken across it.

Caruban, the Toll Gate and the Industrial Edge

The regency’s capital, Caruban, sits in neighbouring Mejayan district and holds the regency government offices, the town square, the station and the bus terminal. A junction in the town joins the national road east to Surabaya, west to Madiun city and north to Ngawi, and Balerejo lies on the Madiun side of that junction.

The same location has made Balerejo and the adjoining Pilangkenceng district a focus for new industry. Both have been mapped as a new industrial area for East Java, and Pilangkenceng has the access road to the Caruban gate on the Ngawi to Kertosono toll road. The national road from Surabaya through Caruban to Ngawi forms the boundary between Pilangkenceng and Balerejo, and the roadside villages of Kuwu and Simo lie along that line.

The town’s cultural claim to fame is the masked dance-drama of Madiun, described on the Dongkrek page, which comes from Mejayan village, and the local sweet made from fermented glutinous rice, covered under Brem Madiun, has its production centre in Kaliabu village in the same district.

Garon, Bulakrejo and Two Local Stories

Two villages carry stories that have travelled beyond the district. Garon is the birthplace of the naval officer Yudo Margono, who rose to become Commander of the Indonesian armed forces in 2023. He grew up in a farming family in the village, attended the primary school there and went on to the state high school in Mejayan. Garon’s six hamlets, Garon, Bakung, Kedung Meneng, Kembangan, Plembang and Sumber, are the setting of a childhood spent in rice country.

Bulakrejo is known for a house that has become a landmark. The house left by Kiai Ali Mursyid, now looked after by relatives, carries scale models of five places of worship of different faiths, built between 2012 and 2019. It is known locally as the marble house and serves as an emblem of a village identified with Pancasila, Indonesia’s national founding principles.

Reading the District

Balerejo is the regency’s north-western frontier with Ngawi, a flat district of rice and rivers and a crossing point for two national roads. Flat rice land of the same kind surrounds Mejayan, the district that holds the regency capital. The local meal of vegetables in peanut sauce is covered on Pecel Madiun, and the district sits within the broader East Java region for those planning a longer route.

• Eighteen villages and no urban wards, with Kedungrejo and Sogo the most divided into hamlets.
• The northern boundary with Ngawi Regency runs along the Kali Muneng.
• The Kali Jeroan floods Jerukgulung when rain falls upstream.
• Two national roads cross the district.
• Kuwu village hosts one of the regency’s porang processing plants.