Rural Drinking Water Safety Project Solves Water Shortage for Farmers in Northwest China

(Reporter Jiang Xuecheng) In recent years, although the central arid zone of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has suffered severe droughts year after year, the family of Ma Hanyu, a Hui farmer in Xiaonanchuan Village, Caowa Township, Haiyuan County, no longer has to worry about drinking water.

“Now getting water is very convenient, just turn on the tap and the water comes.” Ma Hanyu said.

In January last year, a rural drinking water safety project with a total investment of nearly 30 million yuan began construction, aimed at solving the drinking water difficulties of about 5,000 water-short households in 5 townships in southern Haiyuan County. By the end of last year, the main project of this rural drinking water safety project was completed and water was supplied, and 1,800 water-short households, including Ma Hanyu's family, were connected to tap water.

Ma Hanyu said that previously, whenever there was a dry year, his family had to travel more than 30 km to haul water, and the cost of drinking one ton of water was as high as 60 yuan; now, tap water has reached his kitchen, and the monthly water bill for a family of 8 is only a little more than 10 yuan.

The central arid zone of Ningxia is surrounded on three sides by the Mu Us Sandy Land, the Tengger and the Ulan Buh deserts, with an average annual rainfall of only about 200 mm, and water resources are extremely scarce. Local rural residents relied on digging clay-lined cellars to store rain and snow water or on fetching mountain spring water to meet human and livestock drinking needs. In every dry year, when the cellars dried up and the springs ran dry, farmers had to travel back and forth dozens of kilometres to buy water at high prices, and there was even the phenomenon of farmers fleeing “water shortage.”

After the founding of New China, especially since the 1980s, the state and local governments concentrated investment to build a number of water supply projects in the central arid zone of Ningxia, and implemented projects such as rural drinking water relief, water improvement for fluorosis and arseniasis, and rural drinking water safety. But even into the new century, many people here were still worrying about drinking water.

According to a survey by the water conservancy department, by the end of 2004, 758,800 people in the central arid zone of Ningxia still did not have safe drinking water, accounting for 56% of the local rural population. Among them, as many as 550,000 had severely insufficient drinking water quantities and extremely poor water quality. These people often relied on hauling water over long distances to sustain their lives, with the average cost per cubic metre of water reaching as high as more than 100 yuan, a heavy economic burden.
 

    The difficulty of guaranteeing drinking water for large numbers of farmers in Ningxia's arid zone aroused great attention and concern from the top levels of the state. During the “May Day” period of 2006, Premier Wen Jiabao of the State Council personally led a team to Ningxia for on-the-spot investigation and research and proposed solutions. That year, Ningxia officially launched the rural drinking water safety project in the central arid zone, deciding to first solve the basic drinking water safety problem of the 550,000 people most short of water by 2010, and to solve the problem for the remaining population in another ten years, thereby establishing a drinking water safety guarantee system suited to the local countryside.

Over the past 4 years, the various drinking water safety measures in the central arid zone of Ningxia have been implemented in an orderly manner. Up to now, a cumulative investment of 490 million yuan has been made, 58 rural centralized water supply projects have been completed, 39,000 high-standard concrete water collection sites have been built, and the drinking water safety problem has been solved for 520,000 people with the greatest drinking water difficulties.

Li Zhenqi, an official of the Rural Water Conservancy Division of the Ningxia Department of Water Resources, told reporters: “Although completely solving the rural drinking water difficulties in the central arid zone of Ningxia still awaits time, the phenomenon of fleeing ‘water shortage’ in dry years has already been eliminated.”