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Sanction fears sees Sensex plunge 160 points

Despite the timely support by the domestic institutional investors, the prices crashed to their lowest ever points in the recent past following all-round selling spree by foreign institutional investors and speculators, shaking the confidence of the market, sources said.

The marketmen expects further fall in the BSE Sensex as India conducted two more underground nuclear test at Pokhran today.

Reflecting the bearish trend, the BSE Sensitive index opened at 3897.88, touched the day's high of 3906.67 points, fell sharply to touch day's low of 3776.33 points and staged slight recovery from the day's low to close at 3782.76, netting a loss of 162.37 points as against the previous close of 3945.13 points.

BSE president J C Parekh expressed concern over the falling of stock prices, and said, "We will ensure fair and equitable trading on the BSE despite such a volatile market."

Leading BSE brokers expressed fears over the sanctions by US as well as Japan and some other European countries.

The broadbased BSE-100 index declined sharply by 66.46 points to 1665.32 as against the previous close of 1731.78 points. The BSE-200 and Dollex indices closed lower by 16.96 and 2.70 points to 376.92 and 162.15 as against the previous close of 393.88 and 164.85 points respectively.

Brokers said the FIIs were sellers at almost all the prime counters while the domestic institutional investors made moderate purchases at some of the leading counters.

Total turnover on the screen-based on line trading system was Rs 13.27 billion as against of Rs 8.45 billion.

ITC led with a turnover of Rs 2.6 million, Satyam Comp Rs 1.1 billion, Reliance Rs 771.5 million, Tata Tea Rs 684.4 million and State Bank of India Rs 638.2 million, ACC Rs 488.6 million, Pentafour Rs 482.6 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 470.4 million, Castrol Ind Rs 326 million, MTNL Rs 297.2 million, Videocon Rs 280.1 million, BHEL Rs 271.1 million, L and T Rs 266.3 million, Infosys Tech Rs 248.1 million and ICICI Rs 234.4 million.

Hectic activity was witnessed at the other counters in B1 group like BFL Software, HCL Infosys, DSQ Software, Him Fut Comm, Silverline, Global Tele, Leading Edge, Wipro, RS Software, Aptech Ltd, VIP Indus and Tata Infotech.

UNI