Four joint ventures of local and foreign businesses were presented licences yesterday to manage the country’s cellphone towers, ending mobile operators’ ownership of those and paving the way for enhancement of the overall network service quality.

Once all the tower companies start running, mobile operators which are comparatively weak will be able to expand coverage with minimum investment, thus ensuring better service quality, said Telecom Minister Mustafa Jabbar.

“Afterwards the regulator will take tough action against mobile operators for poor quality of service,” he said while presenting the licences at Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission.

The four are edotco Bangladesh, Summit Tower Limited, Kirtonkhola Tower Bangladesh and AB Hightech Consortium.

All stated that they would need to buy towers from the mobile operators and build new ones across the country alongside investing a few thousand crore taka over the next couple of years to make the business viable.

Robi sold most of its towers to edotco Bangladesh, which is its sister company, a couple of years ago, while Banglalink is taking initiatives to sell theirs, said industry insiders.

However, Grameenphone and Teletalk are yet to decide what to do with their towers.

Currently there are about 34,000 towers in the country and the new tower companies also need to build 10,000 to 15,000 more to improve service quality, especially of 4G, said Arif Al Islam, chief executive officer of Summit Towers.

“This is a difficult market for running tower business as a licensee has already been running business for some years,” he said. Telecom Secretary Shyam Sunder Sikder, BTRC acting chairman Md Jahurul Haque and senior officials were present.

The four, chosen from eight that had applied for the licences to the BTRC in June, paid Tk 25 crore as licence fee, including 15 percent VAT. Conditions stipulate that they would have to start operations within six months.

The service must reach all divisional headquarters within one year, district headquarters in two years, 30 percent of upazilas in three years, 60 percent of upazilas in four years and all upazilas in five years.

The government is approaching the preparations to negate the erosion of trade privileges following graduation to a developing country at a leisurely pace, with no free trade agreement yet to be signed with any of the important trading partners.

Bangladesh will graduate from the least-developed country bracket in 2024 as it has already met all three criteria of the United Nations.

But it will enjoy preferential trade treatment for three more years, after which free trade agreements will be crucial in maintaining its comparative advantage in international trade.

Thanks to the guarantee of concessional duty benefit until 2027, the government is taking the matter of sealing free trade deals with no urgency.

“Our target is to sign and make effective the FTAs with some important countries. The negotiations have started,” said Md Shafiqul Islam, additional secretary for FTA of the commerce ministry.

Last month, during the visit of Indian Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, both Bangladesh and India agreed to sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) as the neighbouring country is an important trading partner.

The CEPA will be more comprehensive than a FTA, according to Islam. “Both Bangladesh and India want to take the bilateral relations between the two countries beyond the FTA.”

But there has been no progress on that front thus far.

Similarly, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have been working to sign a comprehensive FTA, which is also similar to the CEPA. The government also started talks with China to sign the FTA.

Earlier, initiatives to sign FTAs with countries such as Malaysia and Turkey were taken but no deal could be reached.

Upon graduation, Bangladesh’s exports will face an additional 6.7 percent tariff, which could result in an estimated export loss of about $2.7 billion in a year, according to a report from the United Nations.

The amount of loss is equivalent to 8 percent of Bangladesh’s export receipts in 2015.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimated that exports may fall 5.5 percentage points to 7.5 percent after graduation.

In 2016, the value of exports from Bangladesh to the countries granting preferential trade treatment was $24.7 billion, which accounted for 72 percent of the total exports of the country.

Regional trade agreements and bilateral initiatives cover about 90 percent of the exports, the report said.

Bilateral FTAs have been becoming instrumental in the global trading system as the prospects of multilateral trading systems under the World Trade Organisation are decaying gradually. There are more than 200 such deals worldwide.

Even neighbouring India has already signed an FTA with the Association of South East Asian Nations and was trying to sign another with the EU.

Jute pulp has the potential to be a growth driver for the economy and can enable Bangladesh to make strides towards becoming a green economy, said analysts yesterday.

“Jute pulp is a potential game-changing growth agenda. Jute offers the potential to be an environmentally sound, rapidly scalable, and poverty reducing new growth driver,” said Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC).

The optimism was shared at a session on jute organised by the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the Bangabandhu International Conference Centre marking its 60th anniversary.

“Because of climate change-induced environmental concerns, jute has become an attractive business proposition,” said Rahman, adding that a lot of people are involved in the sector, which offers the opportunity of 100 percent value addition.

“It supports green economy,” said the economist.

Rahman, also a former adviser to the last caretaker government, said jute pulp and pulp factories were rapidly scalable. He said products that were rapidly scalable have significant backward and forward linkages.

The production of jute pulp is potentially a low threshold technology that can enable setting up of small factories in rural areas, he said, adding that stakeholders, including jute traders, large farmers and local entrepreneurs, would respond if appropriate policies were framed.

Jute pulp is also an environmentally sound product, he added.

The views come at a time when jute production is rising. Exports are also growing, with raw jute and jute yarn constituting 79 percent of the total exports value of $1 billion fetched by the sector in the fiscal year of 2017-18.

However, non-traditional items account for only 9 percent of the total export earnings.

Rahman said the focus has to be on items that were rapidly scalable while have multiple backward and forward linkages.

“This is where the strategic nature of jute pulp comes into play. Jute has a massive domestic market. If we need another war against polythene, jute paper bag can be the one,” he said.

However, he said, the new potential of jute appears to remain hostage to legacy burden, namely the unsustainable fiscal burden of loss making public sector jute mills.

“Why should we be funneling money into the loss-making public mills? This has to be addressed,” said Rahman, suggesting policy dialogues between the finance and jute ministries to tap the potential of jute and the issue of fiscal burden for loss-making public mills.

He recommended framing a jute paper law in line with the mandatory jute packaging law and devising a policy package.

Showing a biodegradable “Sonali” polybag made of jute polymer, Mubarak Ahmad Khan, scientific adviser of Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation, said it was now being produced under a pre-piloting scheme at a state mill.

The government has taken an initiative to commercialise the bag, he said.

Shaila Khan, assistant country director and adviser of Business Development and Partnerships of the United Nations Development Programme, Bangladesh, said adequate investment had not been made to realise the potential of jute.

“We need to champion our own products,” said Khan, adding that jute had the potential from the perspective of attaining Sustainable Development Goal-12.

“Jute can ensure green growth,” she said.

Paul Bundick, chief of party, Agricultural Value Chains Project, USAID, suggested changing the business model of the mills. The mills can buy the whole crop and use the sticks to make activated charcoal, he said.

Nihad Kabir, president of the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, chaired the event while Rina Parveen, additional secretary to the textiles and jute ministry, also spoke.