Uzbekistan marked the 35th anniversary of its independence this week with a sweeping wave of new infrastructure, unveiling 72 industrial and service projects worth 50 trillion soums alongside 91 social facilities in a ceremony led by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the presidency website reported.
The launch events, held across the country's provinces, are reportedly expected to create 15,000 jobs and add roughly 1 trillion soums a year to the state budget. Officials said the projects touch nearly every corner of the economy — energy, agriculture and food processing, metallurgy, automotive manufacturing, electrical engineering, construction materials, mining, and textiles.
Energy featured prominently among the new capacity brought online. Syrdarya province added 1,573 megawatts of power generation, while Karakalpakstan switched on a 200-megawatt wind farm paired with a 100-megawatt energy storage system — part of a broader push to diversify the country's power mix. Separate projects in Navoi province are expected to generate 657 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually once fully operational.
The social side of the rollout was just as extensive. Authorities opened 36 kindergartens, 43 schools, seven universities and institutes, and three hospitals. The centerpiece was a new campus for New Uzbekistan University in Tashkent City, a 10-hectare development built to house 7,000 students. Elsewhere, a new 30,000-square-meter National Library opened its doors, along with a 400 billion soum University of Economics and Pedagogy in Qarshi and a modern medical facility in Fergana province.
Speaking at the ceremony, Mirziyoyev framed the launches as part of a longer arc of economic expansion. He said Uzbekistan's economy has more than doubled — growing over 2.5 times — in the past decade, a period that drew $160 billion in foreign investment and delivered 2,163 major industrial projects with a combined value of $76 billion.
The president thanked the investors, entrepreneurs, builders, engineers and designers behind the new facilities, crediting them with turning the projects from blueprints into working infrastructure. The event closed with a symbolic ceremonial button-press, officially commissioning all 72 investment projects and 91 social facilities at once.
For a government that has staked much of its legitimacy on visible, fast-moving development, the timing was hardly incidental: tying the launches to the independence day anniversary allowed officials to present a decade of investment figures alongside a single day's worth of ribbon-cuttings — a tangible marker of progress ahead of the years-end economic push.
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