More than 120 million people in northern China have directly benefited from a massive water diversion project that pumps water from the Yangtze River in the south to the drought-prone north, authorities said Saturday.

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the world's largest, has diverted 39.4 billion cubic meters of water to arid areas in the north through its middle and eastern routes over a period of six years, officials from the Ministry of Water Resources said.

The western route is in the planning stage and is yet to be built.

The middle route, the most prominent of the three due to its role in feeding water to the nation's capital, starts from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in central China's Hubei Province and runs across Henan and Hebei before reaching Beijing and Tianjin. It began supplying water on December 12, 2014.

The eastern route began operations in November 2013, transferring water from east China's Jiangsu Province to feed areas including Tianjin and Shandong.

(Cover: Aerial view of Danjiangkou Reservoir in central China's Hubei Province, August 15, 2020. /VCG)