The Malingkou Reservoir in southwest China's Guizhou Province is seen completely dry. The drought in the province affects 4 million mu (266,800 hectares) of farms and is causing difficulties for 1.5 million people in obtaining drinking water. Photo: Xinhua

By Kang Juan

The mass relocation of residents affected by China's giant South-to-North Water Diversion (SNWD) project will accelerte this year after years of waiting.

Conflicts of interest among different parties and time pressures have made carrying out the plan – the government's second largest in six decades – a big headache for local governments.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, at least 440,000 residents will be relocated to make way for the first stage of the project's eastern and central routes, with 330,000 of them living in Henan and Hubei provinces and around the Danjiangkou Dam reservoir.

The water level of the reservoir will be raised by 10 meters in order to create an incline to transport water to Beijing via the central route.

"More than 100,000 people will be relocated every year from 2010 until 2014, when the central route is expected to be completed," an official from the SNWD project office was quoted by the 21st Century Business Herald as saying Tuesday.

Sun Jianwen, director of the Shiyan Migration Bureau, told the Global Times Tuesday that the burden of 180,000 people's relocation in Hubei Province falls mainly on the Shiyan municipal government, while around 10,000 have so far been resettled, locally or to other cities in the province, as part of the pilot project.

Ding Guangjun and his family, who lived in Junxian county in Shiyan, were among the first batch to begin the exodus. They were moved south to a designated relocation area in Zaoyang city in late August.

"The natural environment here is better than that in my hometown. But the living standard here is very poor," Ding told the Global Times.

The economic disadvantage, however, doesn't seem to have prevented Ding from joining the first 80 households to leave their hometown.

He said the compensation package for resettling includes a one-off 7,400 yuan ($1,088) payment and 1.5 mu of farmland subsidies per person.

Ding declined to offer an exact quantity, only saying that he was paid some 40,000 yuan more for farm and land compensation. "The amount varies according to different conditions of households," Ding said.

Ding and his neighbors in the county had waited for 17 years before the relocation. The growth of Junxian county was practically frozen due to a national order, calling for infrastructure construction in would-be inundated areas to stop.

The order was issued in 1992 after a feasibility study was accepted, the Beijing News reported Tuesday.

There is no supermarket, Internet cafe or even bus station there, the paper said.

"We thought then that we would move soon and didn't expect the wait to last 17 years," Zhang Peihai, a 45-year-old villager in the county, was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

"I am not a young man any longer and am bad at adapting to a completely different environment," Zhang told the newspaper.

Zhang and some neighbors were moved to Yicheng city. Some are dissatisfied with the quality of their new houses, and some said they haven't received the promised settlement subsidy.

Sun Jianwen conceded that the coordination work is complicated, as it involves the villagers and governments in source and target areas. Even the director in charge of the migration in the Shiyan area was not clear on the standard of compensation, only referring the Global Times to officials at the village level.

According to the schedule set by the provincial government, more than 73,000 residents in the Shiyan area will be displaced to other regions of the province and the relocation must be complete by the end of August.

"I am in a cold sweat just thinking about the huge task," Chen Tianhui, the Communist Party chief of Shiyan, told Shiyan Daily.

The relocation of 180,000 people within three years means more than 160 residents per day on average and three 50-seat buses should be employed each day to transport the people, Chen said.

But in fact, a family needs at least a truck for their luggage and cattle, Chen added.

Work on relocating people has to be detailed and considerate, Chen said, adding that efforts have been made to satisfy residents' personalized requirements.

The large-scale South-to-North Water Diversion project, consisting of the eastern, central and western routes, is designed to move water from the relatively humid south, mainly the Yangtze River, to the dry north.

The north is home to 64 percent of the country's cultivated land, but has only 19 percent of the country's water resources.

The State Council, China's cabinet, approved the project in 2002 after a half century of debate.

The completion of the central route became bogged down and thus postponed for four years from 2010 to 2014 due to economic and social factors such as rising costs.

Zhang Jiyao, chief of the SNWD project office under the State Council, said in December that a record 48 billion yuan ($7 billion) would be invested in more than 70 new subsidiary programs of the mega-project. That amount is more than the sum of China's total investments in the project during the past seven years.

About 72 percent of next year's budget is earmarked for the relocation of people and land acquisition, experts with Zhang's office told Xinhua.

The largest resettlement in China in the past 60 years was for the Three Gorges Hydro-Power Project, which involved a mass relocation of 1.4 million people.

Qiu Wei contributed to this story