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Vivek Law
MUMBAI, Sept 10: When CB Bhave, managing director of the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) in his recent presentation before finance secretary Vijay Kelkar submitted that steps should be taken to ensure that no fresh paper should be created, even he would not have imagined that within a fortnight this would become the norm.
And even though Kelkar left senior officials at Sebi and the two exchanges largely pleased by not having raised any controversial issues instead preferring to be a patient listener, absorbing various comments, it appears that he was listening and listening hard.
If making demat trading mandatory was one major effort reached after over a year of toil, making the primary market rid of paper was perhaps an even more distant dream.
Convinced that the depository is an important element of modernisation of the Indian capital markets and one sure way of bringing the investors back to the market and more importantly ensuring that they remain there, Kelkar set about his task as soonas he left Mumbai.
Within a few days, the Sebi board was meeting. Chief economic advisor, N Shankar Acharya, had already in his report on primary markets suggested that all public issues should be made through the depository. The brief for him was clear, that the spate of primary market measures suggested by him including that of mandatory issuance through the depository, should come through at the earliest.
The depository on the other hand prepared itself with the necessary software and worked out the modalities for bringing in the major reform.
The Sebi board on Monday announced that all public issues from a specified date (sometime in November) would go through only in demat form. These would, however, not necessarily include disinvestment by the government, said a senior Sebi official.
The disinvestment process, could start off as early as in September-end and this did not fit into Sebi's deadline schedule. Kelkar, however, had different plans. According to finance ministry sources, Bhave wascalled to the capital on Tuesday to get a feedback on the preparedness of the depository. With NSDL already prepared with the infrastructure for introducing the facility, the new finance secretary was convinced that the PSUs would be sold off through the depository.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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