After ten years of treatment and billions of dollars being spent, the water in the Huaihe River area is still dead black. Why did the goal of treating water pollution fail?

"Because it's not that easy, people underestimated the mounting task of turning the black water clear and set an unpractical goal in the short term." said Jia Feng, vice director of the Center for Environmental Education and Communication of the State Environmental Protection Administration of China.

"To pollute the rivers just took a few years or a few days, but to turn the river clean will take more than a decade to complete." Jia Feng said during an interview with me at Stockholm Water Week.

This is exactly what has happened in the Huaihe River basin which is the third largest river in China, also known as the hardest to harness river with numerous tributaries and feeds 170 million people in four provinces including Henan, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu in East China.

As Qian Min, director of the Huaihe River Commission of the Ministry of Water Resources of China led a delegation of water experts to have visited the Swedish International Water Institute, I got a chance to have an interview with him.

Being in charge of water conservancy, disaster reduction, water resources distribution and management as well as water quality supervision, Qian Min said according to their supervision, the water pollutant discharge in the Huaihe River basin is reducing after the issuance of the Water Pollution Prevention and Treatment Law and relevant regulations by the central government. Water treatment facilities have been installing. The water treatment job is going on, the water quality in the trunk part of the river has improved, but the tributaries will take much longer time to make them totally clean and safe.

"We thought we shouldn't walk on the wrong road many western countries have walked, we thought we could have a shortcut way, but it seems that we didn't avoid it. The lesson needs to be drawn. " Qian Min said.

Talking about the lessons, Qian Min said it is extremely difficult considering China's population pressure and economic development requirement. "The Huaihe River Basin has an area equivalent to Finland, but they only have 5.2 million people while we have 170 million. The local industries included food processing, leather processing, paper making and other labor intensive enterprises. Due to low profit, if they treated the polluted water, they would not have any profit." Qian Min analyzed.

But the price of pollution is very high. According to Xinhua reports, some towns had booming business 10 years ago, but two years ago, due to the deadly polluted water, the reporters found that many people had left the place and the town became dead, only a few people from other provinces stayed there. The boom was short and detrimental.

Qian Min said the major lessons are: first, the GDP target makes local officials think of economic development only and neglect the environment protection. This resulted the government to buy the bill, but in the end, it is the local people who are suffering from the severe pollution. According to Xinhua reports, almost all the tributaries of the Huaihe River don't have any fish or anything alive. 70% of the water quality is under class V, in other words, very poisonous and can not be used for any purpose.

Thus Qian Min said that it is right that the central government has recently attached Green GDP to officials political merits. This will contain the trend of blindly paying attention to economy at the sacrifice of environment.

Secondly, the environmental sector in local government has no power to prevent factories from discharging polluted water without any treatment. Thus the central government recently sent out independent supervision teams to check the pollution situation and get accurate facts so that proper measures can be taken.

Thirdly, with the central government's policy of developing rural areas, priority is set on village level, but at the township and county level, the budget is still so tight that they have to think of making more money for themselves instead of only functioning as the public service sector. Part of the reasons is that the water fee is too low and not enough to stimulate people to save water or use the fee to provide better public facility.

Director Qian Min said water pollution is one type of the serious pollutions in the area, the other one is the soil pollution, large scale use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, daily waste or garbage have also contaminated the soil. And this kind of pollution will be in the long run affecting people's health and life expectancy.

Although the central government has organized ministries of water, land, health and construction to deal with the safe drinking water issue and help the local people to dig deeper wells in order to have safe drinking water, the situation of having a big river in front but having not enough clean water to drink has not changed.

He suggests more efforts are needed to treat the pollution from the source and the government at various levels should really strictly implement policies and obey the laws to ensure their effectiveness. There should also be economic policies to stimulate enterprises to treat waste water before discharging it. Without the central government's great attention and the great coordination and cooperation among all the provinces, cities and towns, as well as different sectors, upper and lower reaches, the pollution problems are hard to be solved.

"We made great efforts to harness the floods in the Huaihe River, now the flood is less, but the pollution is more harmful." said Qian Min.

"As we see the experiences here in the west, there is no shortcut, we have to really seriously pay attention to environment protection while developing our economy, it is a cost we have to pay, otherwise, the environment we are living in or the water we rely on will not support us any more, then our economy won't be sustainable."

By Chen Xuefei, People's Daily Online Correspondent in Stockholm.