By Lucy Hornby
BEIJING, Feb 16 (Reuters) - China on Thursday announced plans to spend 1.8 billion yuan ($285.71 million) over the next three years to monitor water pollution in a country when nearly a quarter of the population has no access to safe drinking water.
Rampant industrial pollution and agricultural run-off has left only about half of China's water bodies compliant with water quality standards, vice minister of water resources Hu Siyi told reporters. One fifth are classified as unusable.
About 300 million Chinese lack access to safe drinking water.
The ministry plans to implement a system to force regions and industries not to use or pollute more water than they should, Hu said.
China's water quality monitoring is currently so stretched that some areas are only checked every two months, he said. It also suffers from a limited number of monitoring stations and an incomplete series of elements that are monitored.
Pollution, especially when it threatens relatively prosperous urban citizens, is a growing source of concern for Chinese people.
In 2005, a chemical explosion sent an 80-km long benzene slick flowing along the Songhua River, forcing tap water to be suspended in cities in Northeast China and Russia in the dead of winter. The accident was initially covered up but ultimately led to more open reporting of natural and manmade disasters in China.
In recent weeks, two water disasters have come to public attention -- waste from metal processing plants sent cadmium levels soaring in the Longjiang river, which ultimately flows into the populated Pearl River Delta, and a South Korean chemicals barge sank in the Yangtze River, releasing phenol that caused tap water to smell strange in the city of Zhenjiang.
The allocation for pollution monitoring is part of a plan to spend 4 trillion yuan over the next decade on water management, including repairing crumbling irrigation networks and unsafe rural dams, and improving the quality of water supplied to China's expanding cities. That plan was announced in 2011.
In the five years that began in 2011, the government plans to spend 1.8 trillion yuan on water issues. Of that, 345 billon yuan was spent in 2011, with 114 billion yuan coming from the central government. The central government will kick in 140 billion yuan in 2012, Hu said.
The figures most likely include massive dams and the controversial project to dig canals and reservoirs to transfer water from the rainy south to the arid North China plain. ($1 = 6.3000 Chinese yuan) (Reporting By Lucy Hornby, Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)
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