The depository, which is responsible for holding important data of investors' holdings in an electronic form, last week shifted its entire production to its disaster back-up site. This is the first time that the depository has put its disaster back-up facility to use after having tested it earlier.

Interestingly, several of its depository participants were not even in the know of the development and are being informed of it now.

"This shows that we have successfully implemented our disaster back up site. For the entire week we were functioning out of Pune and the fact that no one got to know of it shows that the disaster back up site has worked. It also shows that we do not just talk about having a disaster back up site but we actually have one and there is proof of it", said NSDL managing director CB Bhave.

"For aninvestor this is important as now in the event of an emergency, NSDL has the ability to take the production to another location and hence there is no fear for the investor to lose all his investment data in the event of a disaster. The significance of the development is that no settlement will be at a risk as we have seen that the entire systems can seamlessly be implemented from a different site when disaster strikes", said Bhave.

NSDL has replicated its entire hardware at the Pune site. It has also tested the hub which is common to the National Stock Exchange (NSE) as well.

The depository, which is heavily reliant on technology, has been working hard over the past two years to get an active disaster back-up site in operation.

A major area of concern of investors in moving to an electronic form of trading has been that in the absence of any physical security in their hand, what is the assurance that there holdings would remain intact in the event of a system breakdown.

"We had received severalqueries from investors on this front and we have in our defence cited the innumerable checks and balances that we have in place for safeguarding the investor in the event of a breakdown. The developments of last week should further comfort the investors", said an NSDL official.