The investment will subsidize water authorities' repair of 1,460 dangerous reservoirs and the upgrading of their flood-control and drought-alleviation capabilities.

Of the reservoirs, 145 are large and 584 are medium-sized, said Wang Shucheng, minister of water resources, in his latest report on the issue.

Wang's ministry completed repair of some 200 dangerous reservoirs between 1998 and 2000, with strong financial support from the State.

However, the latest survey by the ministry found there are still 30,413 reservoirs with problems, such as worsening seepage and dams in danger of collapsing because of ageing or substandard design.

The ministry has worked out countermeasures aimed at speeding up the repair of dangerous reservoirs in a bid to eliminate such "time bombs," as some experts have described them.

Under the repair plan, the ministry is urging local authorities to reinforce or rebuild as soon as possible any dams at key reservoirs that show any danger of collapsing.

Officials with the ministry said they hope related authorities will give top investment priority to reservoir reinforcement projects.

They estimated about 33 billion yuan (US$3.9 billion) will be needed to reinforce all of the dangerous reservoirs, including more than 100 large-scale ones with designed storage capacities of at least 100 million cubic metres of water, and more than 800 medium-sized and 32,000 small ones.

With the acceleration of repairs, all of the substandard reservoirs are scheduled to be upgraded to State-set safety standards by 2010.

The economic benefits to be realized by that time are expected to be tremendous, including a 13 billion-cubic-metre flood-control storage capacity, 11 billion cubic metres of water for hydropower, 17 billion cubic metres for general consumption and the irrigation of 2 million hectares of farmland.

China has decided to inject more than 400 billion yuan (US$48 billion) into water conservation projects during the next five years.

Ministry sources said priority for investment will be given to reinforcing the key levees of China's major flood-prone rivers, such as the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers, to renovating large reservoirs with potential problems throughout the country and to improving western China's fragile ecosystems, particularly chronic water and soil erosion - the root cause of poverty for millions of rural people.

(China Daily February 21, 2002)