Govt creating ecosystem to make business operations much easier: BIDA chief

Executive Chairman of the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) Chowdhury Ashik Mahmud Bin Harun today said the government is creating an ecosystem to make business operations in Bangladesh much easier.

"We are going through a very transformational time as you all know that the country has gone through a change and we do have this once in a lifetime opportunity to potentially change a lot of things that were just given for our ecosystem," he said.

The BIDA chief said this at the opening session titled "Bangladesh Startup Connect" at the four-day long investment summit at Intercontinental in the city.

Chowdhury Ashik said once someone lands in Bangladesh physically and interacts with the community, interacts with the startups, interacts with youth, the perception they had from desktop research dramatically changes.

"What we need to probably continue to focus on as an investment promotion agency for the government is how we create that bridge between the assets we have in the country and the potential liquidity that is available globally," he added.

He gave a very trivial example on trade licence, which apparently is a very big challenge for young businesses to start doing business in Bangladesh.

"The questions that we really need to ask is not necessarily how we streamline the trade licence process, but start from do we even need a trade license? And if we do need a trade licence, is it like a birth certificate that we give to a company only once in their lifetime and not have them go 
back to the city corporation every year to renew the trade licence? I am giving you a very, very trivial example, but that is how the baseline currently is. That is how low and deep we need to go to ensure that we create an ecosystem that is much easier for businesses to operate," the BIDA chief added.