Resource information
The Government of Uzbekistan is aware
that the irrigation and drainage infrastructure constructed
under the Former Soviet Union - serving some 4.3 million
hectare of cultivable land for agriculture as well as many
villages for drinking water - is in urgent need of repair
and/or rehabilitation. Also, given multiple competing
demands of investment project proposals (as many as 180) on
the nation's limited, annual investment budget
earmarked for this purpose, it realized the need for a
national strategy aimed at modernizing the water sector
including a medium-term investment plan. It has thus asked
the World Bank to undertake, over a two-year period
beginning in mid-2007, a study that is designed to provide
solutions to the twin problems of how to approach the
rehabilitation of the irrigation and drainage sub-sector and
which of the many competing projects to prioritize. To
overcome this problem as well as the general lack of readily
available, comparable data of proposals, the technical
working group used the Investment project data sheet to
gather relevant information from sub-basin authorities
throughout the country with the instruction to fill in the
required information. Initial progress with data collection
proved extremely slow and cumbersome as the habit of looking
at projects in an integrated manner, i.e. costs as well as
benefits, had not been previously practiced in Uzbekistan.
Given the foregoing, throughout the study period increasing
emphasis was placed on formal as well as informal training
in project preparation techniques of technical working group
personnel and interested Ministry of Agriculture and Water
Resources and Ministry of Economy personnel.
