At least 1 million people, mostly dwellers in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, have made way for the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project.

Now the local government is paving the way for a better life for the resettled residents, at least one out of 10 of whom are unemployed.

The announcement was made yesterday by Wang Hongju, mayor of a city which, formerly a part of Sichuan Province, became the largest municipality directly under the central government exactly 10 years ago.

"The development of industries in the Three Gorges Reservoir area is sluggish, but it is shifting towards the right direction," the mayor told a press conference held by the State Council Information Office in Beijing.

"We will invest 55 billion yuan ($7 billion) over the coming five years and offer preferential policies to improve (the conditions in) the resettled areas."

Wang said that by the end of last year, 1.02 million people, whose homes, fields or factories were inundated by the huge reservoir, had been already relocated. Around 1.13 million people 85 percent of them from Chongqing and the rest from the neighboring Hubei Province will have been relocated by 2009, when the project is due to be finished.

Unemployment in resettled areas reached a record 12.8 percent two years ago, but it dropped by 1.3 percentage points to 11.5 percent in 2006, the mayor said.

The municipality had made it mandatory that there was at least one member of each and every relocated family be employed in non-farming sectors by the end of 2006, Wang said.

The official was upbeat about the future of the resettled areas.

To improve the skills of the workforce, Chongqing has launched a 12-year compulsory education scheme for school-aged resettlers, he said.

On the other hand, the poverty-ridden counties in the resettled areas are receiving "one-to-one" aid from both their coastal developed cousins and the better-off parts of Chongqing, he said.

The one-to-one support for the Three Gorges reservoir area was started in 1992, a year ahead of the construction of the Three Gorges project.

Since then, more than 60 central government departments as well as enterprises, 20 provinces and municipalities and 10 major cities across the country had aided the area with more than 27 billion yuan ($3.4 billion), Xinhua reported earlier.

(China Daily 02/28/2007 page4)