Gov't invests to clean up rural water
By Cao Desheng (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-09-12 08:47 The central government has earmarked 4 billion
yuan (US$500 million) to improve drinking water quality in rural areas, a senior
official said yesterday.
A lack of treatment facilities means more than 300 million farmers, 37.5 per
cent of China's rural population, struggle to get safe drinking water, Gao
Juncai, director of the National Development and Reform Commission's Department
of Rural Economy, told the fifth World Water Congress in Beijing yesterday.
People fish under the Yangtze
River Bridge in Nanjing in East China's Jiangsu Province September 10,
2006. [Reuters]
| The central government's
allocation is expected to help half of the affected people change their water
supplies by the end of 2010, Gao said.
The need for action is illustrated by frequent epidemic alarms in recent
years. Last year in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in South China, at
least 150 epidemics of typhoid, dysentery and diarrhoea were reported, with more
than 80 per cent identified as a result of people drinking polluted water,
Xinhua News Agency reported.
Behind the country's rapid economic growth and development, concerns over
deteriorating environment rise.
"Industrial discharge of polluted water is estimated to have increased by 30
per cent this year over last year," said Xu Shufan of the State Administration
of Environmental Protection.
Zhang Yue, an official from Ministry of Construction, said he was deeply
worried about the problem of waste water processing.
"Currently, almost half of the waste water has not been effectively recycled
despite a lot of economic input in the sector," he said.
In the coming five years, the nation will inject 330 billion yuan (US$ 41.2
billion) into waste water processing to ensure 70 per cent of waste water in
urban areas gets recycled, Zhang said.
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