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SMALL BUSINESS

Business development is Sultana's motto

Sayeda Akter
It runs to 1100 pages and weighs more than two and half kilos, and for many it remains a key guide to the country's business.
Organised by sectors from agriculture to pharmaceuticals, the Bangladesh Trade Catalogue (BTC) provides the address, phone numbers and email addresses of tens of thousands of companies.
Yet behind the directory is not a large publishing house or media group but a woman, Sultana M Chisty, who has struggled for almost a decade to produce the annual directory.
“A developing country like Bangladesh, where business is growing fast, needs a trade catalogue that can present an overview of all the actors in a sector,” Sultana said.
Like many women running small businesses, Sultana was determined not to be financially dependent on her husband. To start with she earned small sums writing books and sending poems and short stories to several national newspapers, such as Ittefaq, Sangbad, Bhorer Kagoj. But in 1995 she raised TklO lakh
through the sale of property and ornaments to start up a travel agency.
The travel agency struggled to get off the ground and two years later she started a new business designing book cov-
ers. However while in London to see her sister in 1998, Sultana visited some women's book clubs and saw ladies carried trade catalogues from their own towns.
“Later I saw it again in Nepal and I started thinking why don't we have this kind of directory in Bangladesh?” Sultana said.
In 1999 she wrote to the commerce ministry for per-
mission and the ministry suggested that she make the catalogue in collaboration with the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI), country's premier trade body. Later that year the country's first trade catalogue was published.
“It was not only about making money for the family, but about doing something that was useful and would help business development in the country,” Sultana enthused.
“The goodwill and demand the book generated encouraged me to keep going," she added, but there were hard times too, with tight budgets and irregular advertising payments from business houses. Moreover collecting and checking information was time-consuming.
"I had to go door to door looking for businessmen and bureaucrats in order to publish the catalogue in a timely way” she said.
The catalogue is a complete overview of the country's 38 categories of business including agricultural products, airlines and travel, banks and insurance, housing, telecom, chemical products, computer,
education, hospitals, apparels and textile.
Six issues were published with Sultana claiming that 60,000 copies of the 2005 edition were printed.
But in 2005 publication ceased. A bitter commercial dispute with the FBCCI and poor health meant Sultana could no longer put the cata-
logue out.
"With the catalogue not being published my offices were looted with all my computers and other furniture taken,” she said.
In the meantime, some people tried to publish a rival catalogue by copying the book's information, fonts and design.
Now however Sultana is back and plans to publish a new edition this June with the support of the Export Promotion Bureau (EPB).
“I don't care about recognition, but I know I have to complete my duties to support our economic growth in my own way,” she said confidently. sayeda@lhedailystar.net