in effect. The relationship between those sides was ambivalent: while legal and military power rested with the Dutch government (or, for a long time, with the Dutch East India Company under a Governor General in Batavia on Java, the regents held higher protocollary rank than the assistant-resident who supposedly advised them and held day-to-day sway over the population. After the independence of Indonesia in 1945, the terms bupati and kabupaten were applied throughout the archipelago to the administrative unit below the residency (karesidenan). In the Telaga Batu inscription, which was found in the village near Palembang and contains a worship of the king of Srivijaya, there may be the word bhupati. The inscription is estimated to be from the end af the 7th century AD, Indonesia inscription expert Johannes Gijsbertus de Casparis translated bhupati with the term head (hoofd in Dutch), the word bhupati is also found in the Ligor inscription, which was found in the Nakhon Si Thammarat province of Thailand. In the 17th century, Europeans called the area Ligor. this inscription was identified in 775 AD 7th century AD, the term bhupati was used to refer to the king of Srivijaya Hujunglangit in the 9th century AD Recent history Since the start of the Reform Era in 1998 a remarkable secession of regency governments has arisen in Indonesia. The process has become known as pemekaran (division). Following the surge of support for decentralisation across Indonesia which occurred following the fall of Soeharto in 1998, key new decentralisation laws were passed in 1999. Subsequently, there was a jump in the number of regencies (and cities) from around 300 at the end of 1998 to 514 in 2014 sixteen years later. This secession of new regencies, welcome at first, has become increasingly controversial within Indonesia because the administrative fragmentation has proved costly and has not brought the hoped-for benefits. Senior levels of the administration expressed a general feeling that the process of pemekaran needed to be slowed (or even stopped for the time being), although local politicians at various levels across government in Indonesia continue to express strong populist support for the continued creation of new regencies. Indeed, no further regencies or independent cities have been created since 2014. However, a paper on fiscal decentralization and regional income inequality in 2019 argued that that fiscal decentralization reduces regional income inequality. Since 1998, a large portion of governance have been delegated