On May 24, 2021, the meeting of Mr. Asset Assavbayev, Secretary General of the PS IGC TRACECA with Mr. Beibut Atamkulov, Minister of Industry and Infrastructural Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan was held in Nur-Sultan

During exchange of opinions, the Secretary General informed that currently, the Permanent Secretariat is actively working on a number of initiatives, including institutional measures and practical steps on simplifying the transportation process and border crossing procedures. It was also noted the main directions aimed at digitalization, improvement of border crossing procedures, introduction of electronic documents, harmonization of requirements for road vehicles with regard to their mass/dimensions, which are actively being worked on with the support of countries.

In order to facilitate the transportation process, the efforts have been made to provide timely and reliable information on the situation and services in countries in the context of a pandemic. In this regard, the Permanent Secretariat has launched a separate page of the TRACECA website - info.traceca-org.org, useful for carriers. This page contains information about the current situation in the member states of the corridor, the places where PCR tests are taken, as well as the conditions of transport in the TRACECA region.
 
In turn, Minister B. Atamkulov proposed to scale up the experience of applying the approaches implemented in the Ashyq system in the TRACECA region, which has become widespread in the form of a pilot project in Kazakhstan to control and analyze data on the epidemiological situation in the country. The indicators noted in the application system by registering patients based on the delivery of PCR tests witnesses the reliability of test results when crossing borders, thereby confirming the fact of compliance with quarantine measures.

TRACECA Secretary General A. Assavbayev noted the work carried out in relation to the development of container transport, jointly developed by the TRACECA countries. The Minister stressed that Kazakhstan provides a competitive tariff on its territory in order to facilitate container traffic along the routes of the TRACECA corridor.In this context, the readiness of other TRACECA countries to provide preferential tariffs on their territories plays an important role.

Discussions touched upon the introduction of electronic queues at the borders of the TRACECA countries. For his part, the Minister assured the Secretary General of his support for this initiative in order to avoid the congestion of vehicles at the borders, efficient planning of the transportation process and timely delivery of goods to the designated point. In addition, Mr. Atamkulov confirmed the readiness of the Republic of Kazakhstan to participate in pilot transportation and proposed to test electronic queues at the Kazakh-Uzbek state border.

During the meeting, special significance was paid to the implementation of the Agreement on Single Transit Permit TRACECA in order to liberalize the transport process and increase the competitiveness of the corridor, where A. Assavbayev expressed hope for its signing by the Kazakh Party.

On the whole, the participants of the meeting stressed the necessity for further intensification of work to create favourable conditions for the development of transport along the TRACECA corridor routes and expressed mutual appreciation for the informative meeting.