YEREVAN, AUGUST 1, NOYAN TAPAN. The World Bank Board of Directors has approved the decision to allocate additional 5 million dollars for the program on development of Armenia's irrigation system. The director of the program implementation office Adibek Ghazarian told reporters on August 1 that 15% of this money will be provided as co-financing by water user societies. This amount will be used to repair irrigation networks of a total of 110 km in Ararat, Armavir, Gegharkunik, Aragatsotn, Kotayk regions and Yerevan. According to him, so far a 190-km intraeconomic network has been reconstructed with 7.2 mln dollars allocated by WB, which is quite a small sum as the country's intraeconomic network makes 15 thousand km. He said that the main water losses (about 60% or 300 million cubic meters annually) are registered in intraeconomic networks. A. Ghazarian said that since 1994 until now, 96.214 mln dollars has been allocated by the World Bank for development of Armenian irrigation systems, thanks to which 26 bulwarks have been repaired, and the mechanical water supply system has been replaced with gravity flow in a number of settlements, which allowed to save 51 million kwh of power a year. Besides, water user societies have been created, and as a result of their activities the collection of payments for water use has increased: in 2003, 2.3 billion drams (6.7 mln dollars) was collected, while last year 3.2 billion drams was collected.

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