This rules out a Monday-Friday cycle for the bourse. The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on the other hand said that its entire badla schedule would go haywire if its settlement cycle was shifted from the current Monday-Friday. NSE follows a Wednesday-Tuesday cycle. To top it, it was felt by a section ofthe committee that the settlement cycle of the latest bourse, the Inter Connected Stock Exchange of India should not be disturbed. Incidentally, the chairman of the committee, M R Mayya has been closely associated with the new exchange in an advisory capacity. This exchange has a Thursday-Wednesday cycle.

As a result of this, the committee which had earlier thought of bringing in uniform settlements across five top stock exchanges for a start changed tack and decided to go back to square one by deciding to bring all stock exchanges within the ambit of uniform settlements. Realising that one settlement cycle is just not possible, the prospect of outlining three settlement cycles is the one adopted by NSE, BSE and the ICSE, one of which could be adopted by any exchange, was thrown up.

However, what has made even this look more remote is the fact that all stock exchanges are going to be caught up with tackling the Y2-K problem till close to middle of next year. NSE itself is not expected to be able to sortout the problem by March 1999. Any change in the settlement software of a bourse would then take at least three months. ``There is no way in which we can undertake any change in our software till the Y2K problem is not sorted out. After that it would take three months to undertake the change. This would bring us to July-August, by which time we should see high levels of demat trading thus leading to rolling settlements. Once exchanges have rolling settlements, the issue of uniform settlements becomes irrelevant. In fact, the best way to bring in uniform settlements across the country's bourses is through rolling settlements,'' said NSE deputy managing director, Ravi Narain, when contacted for his comments on NSE's stand on the issue. He, however, declined to comment on the deliberations of the committee. Sebi has been keen on pushing for uniform settlements to check the gross speculative activity which is fuelled through shifting of positions from one exchange to another on the last day of a particular stockexchange's trading cycle.

The regulator has been at loggerheads with the finance ministry on the introduction of rolling settlements. Sebi has cited paper as the main reason for not being able to introduce the reform yet, but Sebi chairman D R Mehta had recently remarked that rolling settlements would be introduced as and when the market moves to mandatory demat trading. The first lot of securities where trading only in demat shares would start off from January 4 onwards and Sebi expects to bring 300 scrips within this fold by the end of next year.