At the meeting of the working group on depositories convened on Thursday, it was decided that another 29 scrips would be added to the existing list of 31 securities where mandatory demat trading has already been announced from two specified dates. This would take the number of securities to where only demat trading would take place to 60 by April 5 and cover all the Nifty and Sensex stocks.

The 29 stocks which have been added to the list are: Arvind Mills, Bhel, Cipla, Colgate, EIH Ltd, GE Shipping, Glaxo India, Grasim Industries, HDFC Bank, Hindalco, HLL, IFCI, Indian Hotels, Indian Rayon, IPCL, ITC, MTNL, Nestle, Oriental Bank, Procter & Gamble, Reliance Capital, Reliance Petroleum, Reliance Industries,Smithkline Consolidated, Tata Chem, Tata Power, Telco, Tisco and Novartis.

Meanwhile, SEBI has extended the deadline for four securities which were to have gone into the mandatory demat trading for institutions realm from December 15, as these companies had failed to sign up with the depository on time. The companies are Bharat Earth Movers Ltd, Garware Polyster, Indian Shaving Products Ltd and ITC Agro-Tech.

The working group also reviewed the progress of the depository. It was revealed that the delivery of demat shares constituted 52 per cent of the total delivery in all scrips by value at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and 40 per cent at the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in the past few settlements.

It was further pointed out that 85 per cent of the vyaj badla shares are now being delivered in the demat form at BSE. SEBI also convened a meeting with mutual funds and the National Securities Depository Ltd to take stock of the progress made by mutual funds in dematerialisation of their portfolio.

JMMutual Fund and Templeton Mutual Fund have dematerialised 95 per cent of their holdings and others have dematerialised 60 per cent of their holdings. All mutual funds, however, affirmed that by end of January 1999, around 75 per cent of their holdings would be in demat for. Some of the mutual funds would achieve over 90 per cent of dematerialisation of their holdings by the end of January 1999.

Importantly, the mutual funds also indicated substantial savings in transaction and custodial costs as a result of trading in demat form. The savings ranged from 33 per cent to 85 per cent.