More than 200,000 local residents will be relocated to make way for
the construction of the "middle route" of China's massive
south-north water diversion project.
An
investigation group is now verifying the number of would-be
displaced people, who are mainly distributed along central China's
Hubei
and Henan
provinces.
The massive project, which began construction on Dec. 27, 2002, is
to divert water from the Yangtze, China's longest river, to the
country's drought-ridden north area through three diversion
routes.
The investment just for the first phase of construction of the
project's eastern and middle routes reached 124 billion yuan (US$15
billion). And once the first phase construction is completed, about
13.4 billion cubic meters of water could be transferred from the
Yangtze to the north annually.
To
ensure the Yangtze water flows northward, the dam of the
Danjiangkou reservoir, water source of the middle diversion route,
must be raised by 14.6 meters so that its water storage capacity
will increase to 29.1 billion cubic meters, about 1.16 billion
cubic meter more than the original storage capacity.
However, the dam-raising project requires some locals to
relocate.
As
early as 1990, the Yangtze River Water Resources Committee
concluded that about 15,667 hectares of land, covering five cities
and counties in Hubei and Henan provinces, will be submerged to
make way for the dam-raising and about 224,000 locals would be
displaced.
But with the increase of the local population in 2002, it was
estimated by the committee that about 275,000 locals needed to be
relocated, 260,000 of whom were farmers.
Li
Changjiu, a farmer in his 50s living in Xichuan County of Henan
Province, told Xinhua that he hoped to leave his village as soon as
possible because the place is too poor.
"If I continue to live here, my offspring will also be doomed to be
poor," Li said.
According to sources from water conservation departments as well as
departments in charge of resident relocation in Hubei and Henan
provinces, about 90 percent of the locals now living at the
would-be submerged Danjiangkou reservoir area are willing to move
mainly due to poverty.
Peng Chengbo, an official with Danjiangkou city in Hubei Province,
said about 70,000 of the city's farmers now live within the
Danjiangkou reservoir area, occupying more than 20 percent of the
city's whole rural population. Their per capita annual income was
only half the average per capita annual income of the city's
farmers.
Liu Jianguo, an official in Xichuan County, said relocation means a
development opportunity for those locals currently living in
poverty.
Officials of Hubei and Henan provinces all believed that the
relocation work for the water diversion project would be successful
thanks to the relocation experience accumulated when conducting the
Three Gorges Project and Xiaolangdi projects.
(Xinhua News Agency February 13, 2003)