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Ambitious Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern

Only regimes where accountability and transparency are not the buzz words can afford to push ahead with such dream projects.

POREG VIEW: South-North Water Diversion Project for diversion of at least six trillion gallons of water every year to Beijing has entered a key period of construction, according to the People’s Daily. It is undoubtedly the most ambitious of all what Communist regime had undertaken so far.  

Only regimes where accountability and transparency are not the buzz words can afford to push ahead with such dream projects. No surprise, therefore, the environmentalists are up in arms with one of them, Dai Qing saying only totalitarian regimes can undertake such ventures. The criticism stems not merely the very size, scope, and reach of the project but from the fact that the government has not carried out proper impact studies for the $62 billion project.   
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The plan has its genesis in the Mao era. “Water in the south is abundant, water in the north scarce. If possible, it would be fine to borrow a little,” the great helmsman of China reportedly said in the 1950s paving the way for the engineering feat, which is much more ambitious than the Three Gorges Dam.

Three artificial channels would transport the Yangtze water from the south to the north. In the process the channels will   cross some 205 rivers and streams in the industrial heartland of China before reaching Beijing.   

Critics say the human cost of the venture is staggering. One of the channels passing through Hubei province alone will force relocation of about 3, 50,000 villagers. Already some 150 thousand people had been resettled, many of them far from their homes and fields. For three days last November, thousands of residents of a resettlement area in Qianjiang city blocked roads to protest poorly built homes and lack of promised compensation. Police broke up the protests and made several arrests.  

But their sacrifice may go in vain in the end because when water reaches Beijing it will not be safe for drinking, according to experts.

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