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.