Energizing poverty reduction in rural areas

[File Photo]

Last year, China launched a tough war against poverty and the whole country has exerted its efforts to achieve the 2020 poverty relief target. But recently, in some countryside areas, it was embarrassing for some villagers to be fully engaged in running the anti-poverty projects partly due to funding dilemmas and varying local conditions.

A Hot Potato

According to the poverty reduction strategy, China aims to lift its remaining 55.75 million rural population out of poverty in the next five years. Late last year, China began to take some targeted measures to address the issue. Those measures range from rural economic reform to an industry-driven model in social development.

The fund-supported project is committed to helping rural villagers rise out of poverty while helping them make a more efficient and effective use of the available funding. As for the project, the funds should be targeted to all poverty-stricken villages and towns. By using the funds, greater efforts should be made to change the poor people’s lives while giving them easily access to education, medical care and other public services.

"Last year, we planned to build a road but the result seemed a little beyond our expectations," said a farmer in a remote village in northwestern China.

"Despite their efforts in road construction and other basic facilities, they are far from local's demands. Those facilities can only help locals tough several years out. No one can guarantee that the projects will last longer," explained a local official, hoping that those projects could really bring benefits to villagers and aid their daily lives in the long term.

"Those poor villages should be covered with better facilities, thus helping villagers to end poverty. But now, it challenges us to swallow a hot potato," said the Secretary of the above mentioned village Party branch, pointing out that the details of the targeted funds have not been clarified and some measures are failing to take local conditions into consideration.

According to the Secretary, locals aimed to create a parallel path as they received government subsidies designed to aid road connectivity. "But questions follow because of the financial gap," revealed Xinhua.

The government set the bar to 50 yuan (U.S. $7.6) per meter of each sidewalk along rural roadway sections. However, the construction fee is much higher when taking account of its original bad road conditions and other basic necessities for road preservation. "It really challenges our villagers, because most of us are poor enough to narrow the financial gap. Since we started the job, we might as well finish it. Inevitably, it might not be up to locals' expectations in terms of bad quality."

Domino Effect

Some of the poverty alleviation projects might be scaled down as the government funds can't meet the locals' real needs. Despite the efforts from the central government, there are still some rural-centered programs that have been ruined.

Villagers from another impoverished county in China recalled that in 2014 they decided to build a road to connect with the outsiders. As the pre-construction plan required, it should be a 5-kilometer path. "Look! What a rugged road it is! It is improper for local's requirements."

Therefore, local officials held the sub-constructors' accountable for the poor quality of the project. But, the latter attributed the financial gap as the main reason. "It is difficult for us sub-constructors to make further improvements in terms of a financial shortage from the government budgets and the hard-to-reach project in rural areas," responded the project sub-constructors.

The situation also presented local officials with a dilemma. "Many villagers asked us where the money had flowed, and some of them even doubted that we had pocketed the public funds. It discouraged us when a human-centered program was put into operation but later turned out to be a jerry-build project," according to a source who spoke to Xinhua.