The water resources bureau of Xinghua city – administered by Taizhou in East China's Jiangsu province – has been streamlining its surface water supply applications for construction projects since July, allowing various items to be approved at the same time.
Officials say the administrative workload has been reduced and efficiency increased under the new system.
"Thanks to the reform, the number of enterprise argumentation and evaluation reports will be reduced to one-third of the original number and the approval time will also be reduced from over 50 working days to less than 18 working days," said Xu Yuzhu, an official at Xinghua's water resources bureau.
One of the beneficiaries is Jiangsu Meile Fertilizer Limited Company, situated in the Xinghua Economic Development Zone. It recently started using a new pump room and with the increasing water consumption it applied for the use of surface water.
When handling the application matters on-site, Zhu Yonghua, chairman of the company, was surprised to learn that a company water use commitment letter was the only material needed to obtain a water intake permit, instead of the previous water resources demonstration report.
Moreover, the water resources service center of the bureau also provided on-site guidance on the construction of the water pumping rooms.
"The costs of surface water and tap water were 0.2 yuan ($0.03) and 3.7 yuan per metric ton, respectively and our factory requires 90,000 tons of water annually, which will save a lot of costs," Zhu said.