Urgyen stands with his horse in Ngari Prefecture, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Zhou Jianwei)

LHASA, June 27 (Xinhua) -- A total of 16,212 residents in Ngari Prefecture, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, cast off poverty over the past three years, slashing poverty rate from 28.3 percent to 8.3 percent.

According to the poverty alleviation headquarters, 85 villages and four counties in Ngari are no longer labeled poor. The number of poverty-stricken population dropped from 22,948 at the end of 2015 to 6,736 at the end of 2018.

Eighty-eight poverty alleviation projects, with a total investment of around 1.5 billion yuan (about 218 million U.S. dollars), have been launched in the prefecture since 2016. Tourism as a leading industry has helped 2,520 people escape poverty.

In the past three years, Ngari has invested 970 million yuan to build 30 relocation sites for more than 7,700 people. A total of 2,680 km of rural power grids were set up or upgraded, and 7,323 km of highways were built in the rural area.

Ngari is the least habitable prefecture in Tibet, with an average altitude of about 4,500 meters, making poverty alleviation extremely difficult.