Construction began Tuesday on the central section of China's ambitious south-to-north water diversion project to ease the severe water shortage around Beijing.

The office of the project's commission under the State Council made the announcement in Beijing Tuesday.

The project to relieve the country's drought-ridden north by diverting water from the Yangtze River, is larger even than the Three Gorges hydropower and conservation project.

Up to 44.8 billion cubic meters of water will be diverted through three canals to the north, about the annual volume of the Yellow River in a normal year.

The central section of the project, expected to attract investment of 92 billion yuan (US$11.1 billion) in its first phase, aims to divert water from the Yangtze River to Beijing by 2010.

The annual per capita amount of water in Beijing stands at 300 cubic meters, while the international benchmark for an area suffering acute water shortage is 1,000 cubic meters or less per person.

The government has decided to accelerate part of the central section project in northern China's Hebei Province so as to alleviate the imminent problem in Beijing as fast as possible.

This part of the project could provide 400 to 500 million cubic meters of water for Beijing for emergency use by 2007, said Zhang Jiyao, director of the office of the project's commission.

The water would come from four large reservoirs in Hebei Province, and the total investment for this section would be 17.3 billion yuan, Zhang said.

About 90 percent of the plain around Beijing would need the diverted water on the completion of the central section project in 2010, statistics estimated.

On Dec. 27, 2002, the first-phase eastern section of the project began with the long-term goal of providing water for east China's Jiangsu and Shandong provinces. The total investment for this section is estimated to hit 32 billion yuan.

The western section is scheduled to begin in 2010. The whole south-to-north water diversion project is expected to require investment of about 486 billion yuan, twice as much as the cost of the Three Gorges Dam project.

(Xinhua News Agency December 30, 2003)