BEIJING residents might well be wondering whether they will ever see the much-needed water they were due to receive by the time the Olympics rolled around. The completion date for a project to bring water to the arid capital city in northern China has been postponed again.
China鈥檚 northern plain, its breadbasket for thousands of years, is running dry. The country now depends heavily on underground water reserves. Since the scheme launched in 2003, completion dates have moved from 2008 to 2010, and now to 2014.
But the $60 billion project that the Beijing scheme is part of might not be completed at all. Of the three water transfer routes, work on the western one has yet to start. Pollution has delayed the eastern Grand Canal route, and is now blamed for halting the central route to Beijing through the river Han. Officials say more treatment plants must be built.
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But even before the project began, Chinese scientists told New 杏吧原创 that without a clean-up, diverting the Han鈥檚 water would turn the downstream city of Wuhan into an uninhabitable stink hole.