The move follows UTI's recent decision to provide the demat facility for US-64 units. The response so far has been tepid with only 5,000-6,000 units coming up for dematerialisation in a month.

The package is aimed at providing an opportunity to investors to procure demat units of US-64 directly from the market, instead of going through the existing practice of applying for the same and obtaining them through the agent. The procedure adopted, according to sources, will be as follows: UTI will empanel a few brokers -- UTI Securities to start with -- which will pick up a huge chunk of US-64 units fromUTI and provide two-way quotes through the NSE's equity segment.

As US-64 is an open-ended scheme, the quotes will automatically settle in the band of the sale and repurchase price that UTI will announce from time to time. The risk to investors in terms of price fluctuation would therefore be confined to this band which is a mere 30 paise.

"There would be several advantages in doing this. First of all, an investor would be able to get his US-64 units much faster and not have to go through the process of applying for the same. There would be no paper transaction at all. While today, a US-64 can be procured from 51 branches of the UTI, the minute the scheme is put on the screen it will be available across 180 centres of the country and 1,000-odd brokers through the NSE network," said a top NSDL source.

More importantly, the demat route would eliminate the problems associated with the issuance of units as all the centres are connected to the depository through the registrar, MCS Ltd.

"The listing of theunits was not earlier found to be feasible since each UTI centre issued units. There was a problem if a Mumbai-based investor was saddled with a unit issued say from Ahmedabad. Demat has brought that uniformity and therefore a sincere attempt can now be attempted to boost liquidity in the scheme's units," said a UTI source.

The US-64 units have been listed on NSE's wholesale debt segment to provide an opportunity to corporates to trade in these units. These corporates used to park their funds in US-64 primarily by looking at it as a money market instrument. But in the absence of an effective market-making system, trading in US-64 has virtually come to a standstill. "We have had talks with NSDL on the subject and are studying how such an effort would be successful and effective. US-64 has a huge corpus and we want to see a greater level of dematerialisation of these units," said a UTI source.