Sen said reforms, which were started in 1992, were quite different from the objectives that they (reforms) were supposed to accomplish both in terms macro-economic stabilisation and structural reforms. On the capital markets front, Sen said that in capital markets, the regulatory mechanisms and reforms in the terms of transactions, settlement and transfer were in place and with the era of dematerialisation ushering in, a lot of hiccups will be eliminated.

However, according to Sen, the Indian equity markets were still far from being a proper market-driven capital market. ``After eight years of market reforms even now the percentage oftransactions in the equity market by people who own stocks and people who have money to buy stocks is at a meagre 15 per cent of the total transactions. The remaining 85 per cent is done by people who neither own shares nor have money to buy shares,'' said Sen.According to Sen, an equity market is a place where a buyer should have money to buy and a seller should have shares to sell. Thus, the prices at which transactions will actually take place would be the real price of the stock. ``In the civilised markets, there are no trades without owning stocks and if there are then, 50 per cent of the cash is taken upfront,'' he said.

On the banking sector, Sen said that largely all reforms have already taken place and the sector had moved towards a market mechanism, said Sen. He suggested that there was need to fix interest rates on savings bank deposits which was a key problem in making the banking sector fully market oriented. On the debt market front, Sen said that reforms in the absence of good amount oftrading hindered the debt market.