"Our clearing house team is working hard to despatch the rest of the securities to the custodian by tomorrow, " said a BoI Shareholding official. This follows a letter sent by the custodian to the clearing house, asking it to clear the backlog within the next couple of days.

While rumours over the last few days of shares missing from the safety vault unnerved market participants, especially the institutional ones, the absence of an official statement from the BoI top brass on the issue till late last week forced the FIIs to divert their trades to NSE's platform.

According to BSE sources, the promotionof 50 stocks from the non-specified section to the A group on February 23 had led to these problems.

"The clearing house was not equipped with the technology to handle so much of work in maintaining the vyaj badla shares," said a BSE source. "The manual shifting of vyaj badla shares from the vault and back into the system created a backlog of over 8-15 days," he explained. Sources said that the problem cropped up during the first week of April when the no-delivery phase on the BSE had just started, and was further aggravated by end-May. The market was agog with rumours that several shares have been lost which led to a fear that a large amount of the shares which were deposited on account of book bandh vyaj badla were stolen.

However, the internal audit conducted by BoI during the week ended June 20 gave a clean chit to the clearing house, emphasising that no shares had been lost in transit or from the vault.