More than 185 million people in China have directly benefited from a massive water transfer project from the water-rich south to the drought-prone north over the past decade, Chinese authorities said on Thursday.

The South-North Water Diversion Project has transferred more than 76.7 billion cubic metres of water to areas in the north through its central and eastern routes.

China’s South-North Water Diversion Project has three corridors. The central corridor, the most prominent, starts from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in central China’s Hubei Province and passes through Henan and Hebei Provinces before reaching the Beijing and Tianjin Municipalities.