To make this a reality, the nation plans to invest about 40 billion yuan (five billion dollars) over the next 10 years on safe water supply projects, Wang said.

Currently 312 million rural dwellers in China are facing water shortages or unsafe water contaminated by fluorine, arsenic and other organic or industrial pollutants, according to the paper.

Large parts of China, especially in the south, are chronically short of water, a problem that worsens every summer.

This summer's drought has left 18 million people short of drinking water in China, the majority of them in the areas of Sichuan and Chongqing in the parched southwest.

World Off-Target For Clean Water And Sanitation Goals Says UN

The world is in danger of missing targets for providing clean water and sanitation unless governments increase the pace over the next nine years, a new UN report warned on Tuesday.

In a joint study, the World Health Organisation and the UN children's agency UNICEF said that the situation was particularly severe in urban areas, where snowballing population growth is piling up the pressure on water and sanitation systems -- if they exist at all.

A vast improvement in water and sanitation was one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a UN-brokered plan agreed six years ago with eight aims to be achieved by 2015.

The goals also include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and slashing disease rates.

Specifically, world leaders pledged to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

"It is a tragedy that the world may not reach the water and sanitation MDGs. Safe drinking water and basic sanitation are so obviously essential to health that they risk being taken for granted," said Dr Anders Nordstroem, acting head of the WHO.

The report said that a doubling of current efforts would be required to hit the sanitation target, and a one-third increase is necessary to meet the drinking water goal.

More than 1.1 billion people in both urban and rural areas currently lack access to drinking water from an improved source and 2.6 billion people do not have access to even basic sanitation, said the WHO and UNICEF.

The impact is particularly stark on children: the WHO estimates that in 2005, an average of 4,500 children under the age of five died every day from the consequences of unsafe water and inadequate hygiene.

Children are particularly at risk from water-related conditions such as diarrhoea and parasitic diseases. Lack of sanitation also increases the risk of outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

"Efforts to prevent death from diarrhoea and other diseases are doomed to failure unless people have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation," said Nordstroem.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the main focus of concern, said the report.

Currently, just 56 percent of the region's population has access to a decent water supply. Just 37 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa had access to basic sanitation in 2004, compared to a global average of 59 percent.

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