Walking deftly along the hilly path leading to his simple home, 73-year-old Wang Fangde looks much younger than many townsfolk his age.

"I hope to live longer now the drinking water problem that's plagued this village since I was a child has been solved," he said.

Wang, a native of Ruqing village in Anxian county's Anchang town, Sichuan Province, has benefited from a local government initiative that's helped the village's 2,000-plus residents solve a long-standing drinking water problem.

Hilly Ruqing has long been known for its lack of water. Villagers had to rely on rain or surface water or fetched water from muddy ponds about 1 km away.

The water situation even affected villagers' marriage prospects. Wang's relatives introduced him to four women when he was younger, all of whom left when they found out about the village's water supply problem.

Zhang Zhengzhi, a 63-year-old villager, had the same experience. At 18, he was engaged to a girl from another village. But when she visited Ruqing and saw Zhang carrying water from muddy ponds, she left the next day and never returned. "So Ruqing locals had to marry from within the village," Zhang said.

A year earlier, Zhang passed the physical entry exam for the army. But his mother wouldn't let him sign up. "She embraced me and cried. I was the only one who could carry water for the family every day," he said.

"I regretted the decision to stay for quite a long time, because being in the army was considered quite prestigious at that time," Zhang, who practiced traditional Chinese medicine in the village, said.

In 2003, Zhang employed three people to work for 21 days with the guidance of a prospecting team to drill for underground water on his property. "They drilled to a depth of 21 m, but didn't find water," Zhang said.

He tried again two years later, to no avail.

In late 2006, the Anxian county government said it would help to solve the problem. It spent 512,000 yuan (US$70,137) to build a tower that can hold 100cu m of water and to lay more than 20 km of pipeline.

"The water, which is 16 m under the earth, is drawn to the tower and sent to individual villagers' homes through the pipeline," Wang Guofu, an official with the county water affairs bureau, said.

Thanks to the tower, 883 villagers, including Zhang and Wang Fangde, now have easy access to a steady supply of tap water. Zhang said he is at his happiest after a hard day of farm work. "We no longer have to worry about the water shortage, as we have done every day for so many years," he said.

Wang Fangde said he expects a bumper rice harvest this year. "We used to plant rice seedlings 20 to 30 days later due to the water shortage, so we had a smaller harvest," he said.

According to Su Caigang, head of Ruqing village, a new tower is planned atop a hill to draw water, store and send it to remote villagers still plagued by the water shortage.

Anxian is a county under the administration of Mianyang city in Sichuan. The drinking water project in Anxian is one of 10 initiated by the Mianyang municipal government.

It has invested nearly 2 billion yuan (US$274 million) since last year to help unemployed locals find jobs, give rural residents insurance cover, help migrant workers' children attend school, solve water supply problems and improve the environment, Tang Limin, mayor of Mianyang, said.

(China Daily April 10, 2008)