Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality will resettle about 100,000 people from the Three Gorges Reservoir area this year, says Liu Fuyin, director of the city's resettlement department.

The municipality was scheduled to move more than 470,000 residents from the reservoir area from now to the end of 2009 when the gigantic damming project would be completed, Liu said.

It would also have to shift 556 industrial and mining enterprises and rebuild more than 10 million square meters of buildings over the next seven years, he said.

China has invested 29.3 billion yuan (US$3.5 billion) since 1993 to fund Chongqing's resettlement program, with another 9.1 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) in supporting funds mainly from the country's developed east, according to Liu.

More than one million people in Chongqing and neighboring Hubei Province have to make way for the damming project, with over 85 percent of those Chongqing residents.

So far, the city has relocated 260,000 farmers during the resettlement program's first and second phases, of whom more than 110,000 have gone to other parts of the country, but the city still faces a tough task for the third and fourth phases of relocation, Liu said.

The Three Gorges project is expected to cost about 180 billion yuan (US$21.7 billion) in all upon its completion in 2009.

(Xinhua News Agency February 6, 2003)