"SEBI is planning to make public issues in the dematerialised form mandatory in order to boost paperless transactions in the country," SEBI executive director Pratip Kar told delegates at the Global India Entrepreneurs Conference organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci).

Kar said in order to popularise paperless trading, the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) was considering to start depository services in 35 cities across the country.

He said SEBI was also in talks with the State Bank of India (SBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for providing depository services to the non-resident Indian (NRI) community.

The market regulator had also prepared a blue-print for extending the trading facilities of National and Bombay stock exchanges to the middle-east regionallowing NRIs to trade in Indian stock exchanges, the SEBI executive director said.

Kar said that the Securities Exchange Board had created a separate investors cell to address the specific queries and complaints of the non resident Indian community.

On short sales, he said, the committee under B D Shah, which met on Wednesday was in favour of regulating short sales. The committee will meet again on November 27, he added.