President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev said the implementation of the project to concrete 550 kilometres of irrigation canals and ditches has significantly improved water supply to agricultural lands on an area of 200,000 hectares, which will save 450 million cubic metres of water annually, the press office of the President of Uzbekistan reported.
The authorities of the Republic identified two key solutions to addressing growing water shortages: the application of modern water conservation technologies and concrete lining of irrigation canals. The emphasis was placed on the contribution of the agricultural sector — farms and industrial clusters have concreted 13,000 kilometres of internal water networks.
Significant progress in water resources reforms has been made. Impressive results have been achieved through using modern metering systems at the district level and training farmers in the methods for water usage monitoring: the amount of water supplied to agricultural fields has doubled, and an additional 6 billion cubic metres of water were supplied to the metering system.
However, some problems still remain in the industry. Though $1 billion was invested to modernise the main pumping stations (Karshi, Amu-Bukhara and Amu-Zang), the technical condition of medium and small pumping units continues to affect negatively water supply costs. The President said although canal concreting helped to reduce water losses by 10-15%, they remain critically high in 20 districts of the Republic.
