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Sensex zooms up 106.30 points

The 30-scrip BSE Sensex opened at 3041.79 points, which also happened to be the day's low, and shot up by 106.30 points, surpassing the 3100 mark to touch day's high of 3143.64 points. It hovered at the same level till the end of trading.

Senior BSE officials attributed the recovery to the short-covering and ruled out any connection of the positive sign in the market with the various announcements made by the Securities and Exchange Board of India yesterday.

Foreign institutional investors were not very active in the market while domestic institutional investors picked up some bluechips, brokers said.

Jardine Fleming vice-president Jagdish Joshi said, "We are waiting for some new policy measures by the government in the post-Pokhran situation and watching the market carefully."

At the interbank forex market, the rupee also staged a recovery of about 23 paise to 42.67/69 against the American greenback from the previous close of Rs 42.90/92 per dollar. This boosted market sentiments on the bourse, a BSE broker said.

Traders also attributed the steady trend on the BSE to the ban on short-selling by SEBI. The broadbased BSE-100 index gained by 47.99 points to 1374.88 points against the previous close of 1326.89 points. The BSE-200 and Dollex indices closed higher by 11.89 and 5.21 points to 314.38 and 122.55 points against the previous close of 302.49 and 117.34 points respectively.

Among the major gainers, ACC strengthened by Rs 45.75 to Rs 1177.75, Bajaj Auto up by Rs 17.50 to Rs 545.50, Hindalco gained by Rs 20.50 to Rs 650, Hind Lever recovered by Rs 47.75 to Rs 1467.50, ITC firmed up by Rs 36.50 to Rs 644.50, Larsen and Toubro gained by Rs 10.40 to Rs 220.40, Reliance up by Rs 4.40 to Rs 144.20, State Bank moved up by Rs 3.70 to Rs 207.80, Telco by Rs 5.10 to Rs 174.30, and Tisco by Rs 4.80 to Rs 125.60.

The total turnover on the BSE during the day was Rs 6.22 billion. Out of 7041 listed scrips, 1209 were traded.

ITC continued at the top in the list of turnover by registering highest business volume of Rs 1.6 billion, followed by Satyam Computer Rs 592.2 million, Reliance Rs 520.5 million, State Bank Rs 402 million and Infosys Tech Rs 224.5 million.

Hectic activity was observed at the other counters like Castrol Ind (Rs 216.9 million), Hind Lever (Rs 177.7 million), Zee Telefilm (Rs 177.3 million), Tisco (Rs 122.2 million), Tata Tea (Rs 109.7 million), Pentafour (Rs 102 million), BHEL (Rs 97.8 million), L and T (Rs 92.8 million), MTNL (Rs 87.5 million) and ACC (Rs 77.4 million).

UNI