The top work safety supervisor announced a plan earlier this week that could force local officials to take the human cost of economic growth more seriously.

Li Yizhong, minister of the State Administration of Work Safety, said accidental deaths, in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), would in 2006 become a new factor for assessing local officials' performance.

Special attention should be paid to fatal accidents in mines and industrial enterprises, he said.

The plan represents a fresh attempt by the government to lift the curse of workplace accidents, which in recent years has been haunting coal mines and other dangerous workplaces.

If effectively implemented, the new measure will address one of the underlying causes of the problem local governments overemphasizing economic achievements, at the cost of other considerations including lives.

Deadly incidents in mines and industrial firms, which nationwide killed more than 15,000 last year, are often attributed to lousy management and obsolete safety facilities.

But this can be boiled down to an irresponsible attitude and indifference to human lives.

Many of the tragedies could have been avoided if owners and managers had strictly followed safety rules.

Local government officials have a pivotal role to play in this regard because it is their responsibility to ensure workers' safety. In addition, they have the power to punish those that do not abide by regulations.

But many local officials put safety after economic growth because the latter is of overwhelming importance in the current mechanism that assesses local government performance.

This is why many officials turn a blind eye to safety problems.

The consequences of this attitude have become increasingly apparent in recent years, with lives lost in persistently high numbers, coupled with a rapidly deteriorating environment.

Calls for people-centred and environmentally-friendly economic growth have been growing louder in the past couple of years.

Central government officials have said they will make environmental protection part of their evaluation of local officials' performance.

Last year, the government started a project to calculate the so-called "green GDP" of 10 provinces and provincial-level cities on an experimental basis.

The basic concept is adjusting conventional GDP figures relative to quantified environmental gains or losses.

This will definitely tell us something, though it could be very challenging work in technical terms. So is the assessment of GDP against an absolute number of deaths.

But designers of the revised official assessment mechanism must make sure the revision is sensible and practicable.

Existing differences in areas such as industrial structure which by nature affects the chance of workplace accidents must be taken into account to make assessment under the new system scientific and convincing.

Due to historical reasons and different natural endowments, provinces such as coal-rich Shanxi and Heilongjiang have industries that are more prone to accidents than places such as Hainan, the tourist haven, and Beijing, predominantly a centre of politics, culture and service industries.

It would be unfair to directly compare the performance of officials in these two types of location simply in terms of the number of workplace deaths.

A methodology must be worked out that enables different places to compete on a level playing field. Otherwise the revised official assessment mechanism will not be effective.

Difficult as it is, the government's action is commendable and will, at least, make local officials make more reasonable choices between growth and loss of life.