East China's Anhui Province will relocate 390,000 residents living near the Huaihe River, one of the flood-prone rivers in China, in the next five years, officials said Thursday.

Those residents, who are among the 700,000 living in the spillways and flood retention basins near the river, would be relocated to ensure the utility of the flood retention area and to minimize the impact of possible floods on these people's lives, Ji Bing, chief of the Department of Water Resources of Anhui Province, said at a conference on controlling the river.

Ji added that China had spent more than 300 million yuan (US$45 million) to relocate people from 10,000 households in 2010 and would further invest 65 billion yuan on additional relocations, as well as embankment reinforcement, construction and adjustment of spillways and flood retention basins, along with other projects of the Huaihe River control by 2020.

Deputy Water Resources Minister Jiao Yong said the relocation project was not only a river control matter, but also related to people's livelihoods, and efforts must be made to ensure that work and the lives of those relocated be quickly returned to normal.

The 1,000-km-long Huaihe River starts in Henan Province and flows through Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. The river floods a 1.73 million hectare area, mainly in Anhui, every three to four years, on average.

In 1950, the central government issued a circular outlining the Huaihe River flood control project. China has, over the past 20 years, spent 44.7 billion yuan (US$6.7 billion) on the construction of dams, reservoirs, flood control headquarters and other facilities in a bid to protect people and property from the repeated flooding.

(Xinhua News Agency December 3, 2010)