BEIJING - The latest environmental reports show that there is hardly any pollution of either the air or water in Tibet, according to a white paper issued on Monday.

Tibet has basically maintained its original natural condition and is globally one of the areas with the best environment, says the document that is titled Sixty Years Since the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet. The white paper was issued by the Information Office of the State Council.

The report notes that ecological conservation efforts have been progressing rapidly and environmental protection was being strengthened throughout Tibet.

Since its peaceful liberation in 1951 and especially since the adoption of the reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s, the central and regional governments have attached great importance to ecological conservation and environmental protection in Tibet.

It also says the average life expectancy of people in Tibet jumped from 35.5 years to 67 years by the end of 2010, thanks to improvements in medical services during the past six decades.

The death rate among women during childbirth dropped from 5,000 deaths per 100,000 to 174.78 per 100,000, and the infant mortality rate moved from 430 per thousand to almost 21 per thousand, according to the white paper.

It says that, before the peaceful liberation in 1951, there were only three small, shabby government-run institutions of Tibetan medicine and a small number of private clinics, with less than 100 medical workers in total.

By the end of 2010, there were 1,352 medical institutions of all types and levels in Tibet as well as 8,838 hospital beds and 9,983 medical workers, according to the white paper.

The population in Tibet has tripled to 3 million since 1951, with ethnic Tibetans accounting for 90.48 percent of that population, according to China's sixth national census.

Improvements have also been seen in education.

The enrollment rate for school-age children was less than 2 percent and illiteracy was as high as 95 percent among the young and the middle-aged in 1951, the document says.

Sixty years later, the enrollment rate for primary school-age children from the Tibetan ethnic group had reached 99.2 percent and the illiteracy rate among the young and middle-aged had fallen to 1.2 percent, the white paper says.

Xinhua