Following the construction of drinking water projects, a total of 88,000 farmers and herders have had access to hygienic drinking water over the past three years, according to the latest statistics from the Tibet Autonomous Regional Water Resources Bureau.The bureau said that 1,222 drinking water projects were built with a combined investment of 150 million yuan (18.14 million U.S. dollars) in the past three years.

These projects also provided clean drinking water for 2.2 million head of livestock.An official with the bureau said Tibet plans to invest 480 million yuan (58 million dollars) to construct more than 3,000 drinking water projects between 2001 and 2005.

At present, construction of this year's first batch of drinking water projects with a total investment of 190 million yuan (22.9 million dollars) has been completed.These projects provide clean drinking water to 120,000 more people and 2 million more head of livestock in the region.

The second batch of projects this year, which is expected to enable more than 220,000 local farmers and herders and 2 million head of livestock to have access to clean drinking water, will begin in July.Tibet is rich in water resources and the region is dubbed as the source of Asia's rivers. Per-capita water resources equal about 172,000 cubic meters in the region.

However, due to special conditions on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, people in some parts of Tibet had to share the same water source with animals, and in some places, people had to fetch water from remote areas.Thanks to the construction of drinking water projects, 243,000 people and 5.1 million head of livestock in the region have had access to drinking water since the 1950s.