The revamped index, to come into effect from November 16, would include Infosys Technology, NIIT, Castrol and Novartis, but excluded Arvind Mills, Great Eastern Shipping, SAIL and IPCL. Wipro, which was expected to be in the revamped index, was not included in the new list.

After the inclusion of these four stocks, the market capitalisation of the index has increased by Rs 7,000 crore. The market cap of the BSE's new index at Rs 1,65,558 crore would now represent 34.5 per cent of the total market capitalisation as compared to 33 per cent earlier, BSE executive director R C Mathur said.

"The decision was taken keeping in view the liquidity, market capitalisation, industry representation and performance of these scrips," he told newsmen at a press conference here today. Considering theneed for continuity and co-relatability of an index, it was necessary to include the industry which had outperformed the index over the past six months and also had long-term prospects, he added.

Commenting on the index committee's decision to delete textiles and the shipping industry, committee chairman and BSE governing board member Anand Rathi said, "ten years ago these industries formed a larger percentage of the market capitalisation which is not the case today".

The BSE has also revised weightage of scrips in the index while including these new stocks. According to the revised index, the scrip having largest market cap is Rs 33,475 crore of HLL representing 20.2 per cent of the index market capitalisation while the index having smallest market cap is Rs 1,093 crore of Tata Power representing 0.66 per cent of the index market cap.

Replying to a question Rathi said that after the inclusion of new scrips turnover in the index-based scrips likely to go up as most of the fund managers keep their eye onindex-based scrips. However, he ruled out the purpose of increasing turnover while adding these scrips. The committee has also laid down criteria for BSE-30 sensitive index selection and review in its meeting.

He said this is the second time in last two years the exchange has revised the Sensex to bring it in line with the present market situation. ``The earlier revision was done in August 1996,'' he said.

Another leading bourse of the country, National Stock Exchange (NSE), also revised its indices by including infotech scrips recently.