Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- On 20 July, President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev got acquainted with a presentation on the results of reforms in the architectural and construction sector.

Every year the creative work in our country is gaining an ever wider scale. There is a process of urbanization in the regions. Construction work is in full swing in rural areas.

This requires improving industry regulations, ensuring transparency, and developing the mortgage market based on new requirements. Over the past three years, about 40 acts of the President on these issues have been adopted.

As a consistent continuation of this work, the presidential decree from 13 March 2020 identified measures to further deepen reforms in the construction sector, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, ensure transparency at all stages, and widely use innovative developments and advanced information technologies.

The Ministry of Construction has been tasked with updating 60 out of 337 urban planning rules and regulations this year. At the beginning of the year, the Ministry established a Center for Technical Regulation in Construction, which attracted 15 qualified specialists. At present, 33 new norms and rules for urban planning have been developed.

The meeting instructed to attract a foreign company with advanced experience to accelerate work in this direction.

The President sharply criticized manifestations of corruption and the "shadow economy" in the field, stressed the need to digitize the process of holding tenders for construction and selecting contractors.

Today, there are 32,000 construction organizations operating in the country. At the meeting, the task was set to launch a single platform, which will include information on financial performance, the solvency of construction organizations, their participation in public procurement and staff qualifications. This platform will be implemented by 1 November in Tashkent and from the beginning of next year - throughout the country. It will be integrated with the electronic work record system.

According to the analysis, over the past two years, within the framework of state programs, tenders were held for only 182 construction projects out of more than 3,000. Due to the complexity of the tender procedures, the priority is given to low cost, and the competence of the construction organization fades into the background.

In this regard, starting next year, funds will be allocated to construction companies that are included in the new information system and the corresponding rating.

A separate resolution was adopted to improve the author’s, technical and state supervision in the field of construction, all conditions for this were created. It was noted that now it is necessary to exercise control not "manually", as now, but with the use of IT technologies.

Responsible persons were instructed to form a database of construction enterprises and objects within a month.

From 1 August 2020 in the city of Tashkent, and from next year in all regions, supervisory processes will be automated with the introduction of all identified deficiencies with photographic fixation into the online platform.

An interactive system will be launched, which will allow construction companies and citizens to receive at any time full information about the procedure and conditions of construction.

The need to translate into electronic form all the norms and rules of urban planning, digitalization of the processes of examination of design estimates and storage of expert opinions in a single database.

These measures will reduce the time for issuing building permits from 254 to 84 days, reduce the number of permitting procedures from 17 to 5 and the time spent by citizens - by 67 percent.

At the meeting, the responsible persons reported on the work being done to digitize the construction industry, ensure its transparency, and update urban planning rules and regulations.