Citizens of Armenia will be able to better understand the process of obtaining a water use permit, which is clarified and made more accessible by the government's decision.
At today's session, the government approved the procedures for issuing a water use permit, its term extension, reformulation, review, suspension, revocation, termination, and the draft on approving the model form of the water use permit, borehole passports, and the draft geotechnical section of the borehole, which was presented by the Minister of Environment, Hakob Simidyan.
"The change stems from the Water Code, which we fully adopted last year. With the adoption of the project, the process of issuing a water use permit will be clarified and accessible to citizens. We have specified the list of documents required for the issuance of a water use permit, separated them according to the purposes, and defined the information of which bodies the authorized body should evaluate the positive or negative conclusion of the application based on. We do not require any such information under current regulations. The cases of issuing, extending, reformulating, revising, revocation of suspension and termination of water use permit are also presented in detail. According to the current regulations, these are not differentiated in any way and it is not known in which case what documents are needed," stressed Minister Simidyan.
He considered an important change in the case of underground water resources, in addition to the permit, also the issuance of a passport.
"The permit period is not fixed in the passport. there is a risk that in the case of extension, we do not have the opportunity to review the permit, and since the permit is from underground water resources, from deep wells, we have problems with water in case of climate change, and this regulation will help us in the case of extending the permit period to review whether the water resource is currently are we allowed that the water use permit is for x amount of water intake and not less or more?" concluded Hakob Simidyan.