Beijing: Government officials expressed their confidence that 170,000 people will have been successfully moved out of the Chongqing Municipality before June next year when some of the area is flooded to make way for the world’s largest water conservancy project. "We will meet the June schedule for the removal of people before the water level of the Three Gorges dam area is raised to 135 metres," said He Guoqiang, Party secretary of the municipality. By then, a total of 500,000 Chongqing residents will have been resettled, said He at a press conference during the Fifth Session of the Ninth National People’s Congress (NPC) yesterday. The Three Gorges dam project, including a 2000-metre-long dam on the Yangtze River and the world’s largest hydropower plants, requires the resettlement of 1.2 million people in the reservoir area. Over 80 per cent of the people to be moved live in the Chongqing Municipality. The city, one of the four municipalities directly under the jurisdiction of the State Council, had already relocated 330,000 residents by the end of last year. They have been either moved to economically developed coastal cities or to higher locations. Bao Xuding, mayor of the municipality, said "most of the migrants have settled in and are integrating with local society." He Guoqiang said the resettlement is one of the four major tasks that President Jiang Zemin identified five years ago when the government approved the establishment of the municipality. And they are quite satisfied with its fulfillment of the task over the past years. Bao said the city has invested 16.7 billion yuan (US$2 billion) in moving residents so far, and is to spend a further 3.5 billion yuan (US$423.2 million) this year. More than 30 billion yuan (US$3.6 billion) will have been spent in relocating over 1 million residents when the project is completed by 2009, Bao said. China launched the dam project in 1993 to curb flooding along the flood-prone middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the country’s longest.