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Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Construction and Housing and Communal Services has formally retracted a figure its own minister gave to parliament, acknowledging that the number of illegally built apartment blocks in Tashkent is 61 — not the 720-plus cited ten days earlier — while leaving a separate numerical discrepancy unexplained.
On 22 October the ministry published a clarification stating that more than 320 unauthorised construction objects had been identified across the capital. That total, it said, covers a range of categories: individual residential houses, small shops, trading kiosks and pavilions. The 61 multi-storey apartment blocks represent only one subset of that broader count.
“In the response we provided, the total number of construction objects was mistakenly indicated as the number of apartment buildings. We apologise for this error,” the ministry said, adding a request that journalists and social-media authors update their coverage accordingly.
A Figure That Doesn’t Add Up
The correction raises an arithmetic problem the ministry did not address. Construction and Housing Minister Sherzod Khidoyatov told a Government Hour session of the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis on 13 October that Tashkent alone contained “more than 720 such multi-storey buildings” erected without permits from architectural authorities. The ministry now says the total illegal-construction count across all categories is more than 320 — a number smaller than the apartment-block figure Khidoyatov originally gave parliament. No explanation was offered for how a figure exceeding 720 shrank to a total of 320-plus across all building types.
At the parliamentary session Khidoyatov described the situation as “a very painful problem,” saying many entrepreneurs had built residential properties on plots acquired through auctions before Tashkent’s general urban plan was approved at the end of 2024. He said the General Prosecutor’s Office was already handling the cases and that the ministry was developing a procedure for bringing such buildings into lawful operation — requiring compliance with urban-planning standards on playgrounds and parking, as well as structural inspections.
What Buyers Are Being Told
The minister had previously urged citizens to verify, before purchasing a flat, that any development is registered in the Transparent Construction (Shaffof Qurilish) system, saying that registration would guarantee there were no questions over seismic safety or legal status. That advice takes on added weight now that the scale of the problem — however measured — has been publicly contested by the ministry itself.
The episode underscores the difficulty of establishing reliable baseline data on unauthorised construction in a city whose master plan was only finalised late last year, and where the prosecutorial and regulatory response is still being designed.