Kazakhstan to consolidate records of all strategic resources into a single digital database

The government has decided to merge them into a single digital database covering virtually the entire spectrum of the country's national resources, reports BAQ.kz.

The essence in brief

• Kazakhstan plans to automate the accounting of land and water resources, the forest fund, groundwater, as well as hydrocarbon and solid mineral deposits, combining all data in a single digital database of the State Register.
• Today, digital accounting covers only certain types of resources and is used primarily in electronic auctions — extending the approach to all strategic resources of the country will be a qualitative change in the scale of the system.
• The creation of a unified database is part of a broader transition of the e-Qazyna.kz platform from fragmented accounting of state property to a single digital space, as envisaged by the roadmap through 2029.
• The next stage in the platform's development will be the introduction of artificial intelligence and Big Data — the system should learn to identify signs of inefficient use of state property, predict infrastructure wear and tear, and plan maintenance costs more accurately.

What is already changing right now

The head of the relevant department, Zhanasyl Ospanov, outlined the main goal of the project: to ensure automated accounting of all strategic, surface, and subsurface resources in a single digital database of the State Register. As part of the transformation, digital profiles of state property objects are already being introduced — with data on the object's life cycle, up-to-date photographs, and precise geographic coordinates. In the future, it is planned to also connect real-time space monitoring data, which should free the system from having to rely exclusively on data manually entered by agencies on the ground.

A system that will unite systems already familiar to us

The significance of this project becomes clearer against the backdrop of the sectoral digital systems we have written about previously. Kazakhstan recently put the National Water Resources Information System into commercial operation, uniting data on rivers, lakes, and hydraulic structures, while in parallel the Ministry of Agriculture is working to merge the digital systems of the agro-industrial complex — subsidies, livestock traceability, agricultural land monitoring — into a single platform by 2028. The new State Register database, judging by its stated scope, is conceived as a higher-level system — one capable in the future of combining data from these and other narrowly sectoral platforms into a single space, rather than creating yet another parallel accounting system.

Relevance for the mineral resources sector

Particular attention is warranted by the inclusion in the database of hydrocarbon and solid mineral deposits — precisely the data whose accuracy and accessibility directly affect the investment attractiveness of Kazakhstan's mining industry. A single, up-to-date register of deposits can simplify the work both for government agencies distributing subsurface plots at auctions and for investors assessing the prospects of specific projects — an issue that is especially significant amid the active expansion of Kazakhstan's portfolio of promising sites for rare and critical metals.

Author's conclusion

The idea of bringing together the accounting of such heterogeneous resources — from the forest fund to mineral deposits — is ambitious and will require reconciling data from dozens of agencies that for years worked with their own, mutually incompatible accounting systems. The roadmap through 2029 gives the project enough time for phased implementation, but the real test will not be the fact of merging databases as such, but whether the promised artificial intelligence based on this data can actually identify inefficient use of resources — rather than simply storing a digitized version of already existing paper registers.