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Sensex greets new fiscal year with 77 points rise

The FIIs bought considerable amount of bluechips such as Reliance Industries Limited, Bharat Heavy Electric Limited, and ITC shares, leading brokers said.

Mirroring the uptrend, the BSE Sensitive index crossed the psychological barrier of 3900 mark when it opened at 3901.44 points, touched the day's high of 3974.10 points before closing at 3969.57 points, registering a handsome gain of 76.82 points as against the previous close of 3892.75 points.

Equities at the non-specified counters also shown good sign of an improvement as punters made sizeable purchases there. The National index jumped over the 1700 mark and closed at 1732.12 points over the last trading day's close of 1697.14 points, gaining 34.98 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices rose by 07.86 and 03.32 points to 384.50 and 162.07 points as compared to yesterday's close of 376.64 and 158.75 points respectively.

The leading domestic financial institution -- Unit Trust of India -- has collected only Rs 9 billion from the investors during the last financial year as against its expectation of Rs 12 billion, a leading broker said, and added that UTI was at the forefront among the sellers.

The market opened with good buying support from all corners. During intraday trading, some bull operators booked profits which drifted the Sensex lower to opening level, but at the fag end punters entered the market and bought index-based shares which lifted the Sensex up, brokers said.

The governing board of the Bombay Stock exchange today unanimously elected Jaswantlal Parekh as the new BSE President and Rajendra Banthia as vice-president for the year 1998-99.

The volume of business was Rs 14.4 billion involving 51 million shares in 136,855 trades. Out of 7000 scrips, a total number of 1613 scrips were traded on the bolt system.

ITC registered turnover of Rs 5.4 billion followed by RIL Rs 1.2 billion, Castrol India Rs 838.9 million, Tata Tea Rs 616.2 million, SBI Rs 506.1 million, Sterlite (P) Rs 464.7 million, MTNL Rs 451.3 million, TELCO Rs 367.1 million, ACC Rs 311.6 million, Hind Lever Rs 271.3 million, Infosys Tech Rs 223.1 million, TISCO Rs 216 million, BSES Rs 200 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 196.5 million and Satyam Comp Rs 194.7 million in the specified counters.

Good transactions were observed at Bata India Rs 42.1 million, Software Sol Rs 24.1 million, BFL Softwar Rs 22.9 million, Thiru Aroora Rs 15.1 million, Aptech Rs 14.4 million, Cipla Rs 13.5 million, Wipro Rs 9.5 million, Goodlass Rs 9.4 million in the non-specified counters.

UNI