Previously, it was incumbent on the specialist driving schools to approve learners as ready to step up to take a driving test. This, the government said, added cost, bureaucracy and corruption that was putting people off taking driving exams.

Kazakhstan has one of the worst ratios of deadly accidents on its roads. In 2013, the World Health Organisation said that deaths by car accidents in Kazakhstan averaged 24.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest rate among countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus and around four times higher than the European average. These are often attributable to poor roads or poorly maintained vehicles, but also to bad driving.

An official in the interior ministry told the Conway Bulletin on condition of anonymity that the new rules were designed to simplify government procedures, cut red tape and encourage people to sit a driving exam.

“It is done for simplification. If a person knows the rules, has some driving skills and he or she can pass the exams, we do not think it is necessary to make them study in driving schools,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, driving instructors were less than impressed.

The Kazakh Association of Driving Schools said that the government’s new rules may actually worsen the quality of driving in the country.

Learner driver Akbota Mulkibayeva also doubted the new system would eradicate corruption.

“It is sad because there will be even more bribes to pass the test now,” she said, emphasising Kazakhstan’s shifting and hard to eradicate corruption issues.