Earthquake survivors have seen their new permanent residences being built in southwestern Sichuan Province, 100 days after the May 12 disaster, but it's still unclear whether the many buildings that collapsed met quality standards.

"The construction of permanent residences for quake survivors first started in the rural areas," said Huang Yanrong, Sichuan Province vice governor, at a press conference here on Tuesday.

As of Aug. 12, about 175,000 rural permanent residences were under construction and 20,000 had been finished.

Under a provincial government policy issued in June, rural families who lost homes will build permanent new houses themselves under government supervision. Each will receive 20,000 yuan (2,900 U.S. dollars) from the government.

The administration worked out guidelines for quake-resistant designs and provided more than 200 farm house designs, Huang said. "We also supervised the construction projects to make sure they meet quake resistant standards."

Building hasn't started in the cities yet. "We are working on a subsidy policy for urban survivors," she said.

The province has classified urban homeless families into five categories according to their financial status, although it hasn't specified how those categories are determined.

The administration will build low-rent apartments for low-income households and affordable housing units to be sold to families classified as lower-medium income, Yang Hongbo, the provincial construction department director, told the same press conference.

Families with medium, medium-high and high incomes will have to find new residences by themselves, he said. "But all families that lost their residences in the earthquake will receive subsidies from the government."

According to the provincial government website, a low-wage urban family is one whose average disposable annual income per capita was 3,231 yuan in 2005. The amount for a high-income family was 18,088 yuan.

The province was estimated to need 37 million tons of steel and 370 million tons of cement for quake rebuilding in the next three years, Yang said.

The administration is also repairing school buildings damaged in the quake and building temporary classrooms for the new semester, to start on Sept. 1.

Asked whether any collapsed public buildings were found to have been of poor quality and whether any penalty had been imposed on contractors, Yang said the provincial government is still examining the quality of damaged and collapsed buildings.

The 8.0-magnitude quake affected Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces, with Sichuan the worst hit. The death toll has exceeded 69,000.

The provincial government announced on Aug. 12 that all displaced people had moved into temporary housing.

(Xinhua New Agency August 19,2008)