More than 61,000 poor people from the most inhospitable parts of northwest China's Gansu Province will be moved this year in a government-supported poverty eradication program.

Gansu Provincial Development and Reform Bureau said program beneficiaries would come from 69 counties (cities or districts), including 10,425 residents who would move to make way for construction of ecological projects, and 5,279 people who would move out of geologically unsafe areas. The cost is 270 million yuan (about 36.99 million US dollars), said the source.

The figure will account for about one quarter of the total rural poor China plans to move under the poverty eradication program this year. Central government will support the project to the tune of 1.2 billion yuan (about 165 million US dollars).

Gansu, an arid, land-locked region, is one of the country's poverty-ridden areas. It began the poverty eradication program in 2001.

Since then, more than 340,000 poor people who had lived in areas with harsh conditions have moved and settled on better land, thanks to financial support of 1.46 billion yuan from the state.

(Xinhua News Agency March 11, 2008)