NUR-SULTAN – Up to 95 percent of local roads will be improved by 2025 as part of the country’s Nurly Zhol infrastructure program, reports the official website of Kazakh Prime Minister. So far, as part of the program, 75 percent of local roads were improved by 2020.
Works on roads of 2,200 kilometres will be completed by the end of the year. Photo credit: primeminister.kz.
Last year, the Kazakh government started to implement the second stage of Nurly Zhol state infrastructure development program for 2020-2025, but due to the pandemic, the schedule had to be modified to ensure that road projects are implemented on schedule and with regard to restrictions on interregional movements, including adding a green corridor for unhindered access of building materials.
A total of 9,800 kilometres of public roads were built, renovated and repaired.
Despite the pandemic, all 200,000 jobs (100,000 people in construction projects and 100,000 people in related industries) were saved.
As part of the Nurly Zhol program, Kazakhstan received more than $3.9 billion in loans from international financial institutions to construct and reconstruct national roads since 2015.
In 2021, the total amount of funding for local roads from national and local budget by 2021 amounted to 301 billion tenge (US$707 million), including 163 billion tenge (US$382,8 million) for regional and district roads and 138 billion tenge (US$324,1 million) for the cities of national significance – Almaty, Shymkent and Nur-Sultan.
The construction of high-speed four-lane highways linking the capital city with the regions on a beam basis continues.
The priority reconstruction projects for Kazakhstan are the international corridors running through the country. There are seven of them – Western Europe – Western China, China border-Maika Shanghai-Kalbata, Almaty-Nur-Sultan-Petropavlovsk-Kurgan, Nur-Sultan-Kostanai-Chelyabinsk, Aktobe-Atyrau-Astrakhan, Atyrau-Uralsk and Taldykorgan- Ust-Kamenogorsk along with Usharal-Dostyk-China.
Construction and reconstruction works are scheduled to cover 3,800 kilometres of roads in 2022.
