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Sensex plunges 101.52 points

UTI sold huge quantities of limelight shares, including those of software companies. Foreign institutional investors, major players in the country's capital markets, adopted a "wait-and-watch" role in view of the recent political development at the Centre. They were also awaiting the Reserve Bank of India's announcement on the first phase of the credit policy for the financial year due on April 29, leading brokers said.

Reflecting the downtrend, the BSE Sensitive index opened higher at 4305.61 points, touched the day's high of 4322.00 points, dipped below both the psychological barrier of 4200 and 4300 mark, before closing at 4179.44 points, suffering a loss of 101.52 points as against the previous close of 4280.08 points.

The BSE-100 National index, which also crossed the psychological barrier of 1900 mark to touch 1908.73 points in the intraday trading, crashed to 1843.03 due to heavy selling by the domestic players. losing 46.90 points over yesterday's close of 1889.93 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices too finished lower by 11.61 and 5 points to 417.80 and 175.08 points as compared to previous close of 429.41 and 180.08 points respectively.

Marketmen said that market players were eagerly waiting the Reserve Bank of India's credit policy.

The capital market will fluctuate in the range of 4000 and 4200 mark till the general budget, and only after that it may have some movement, the brokers added.

The total turnover was Rs 1659.30 million involving 8.46 million shares in 2,14,158 trades. Reliance Industries Limited led the volume of business with Rs 1.9 billion, followed by ITC Rs 1.4 million, SBI Rs 871.6 million, Tata Tea Rs 829.2 million, ACC Rs 700.8 million, Satyam Comp Rs 641.8 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 414.0, Castrol Ind Rs 412.7 million, Pentafour Software Rs 369.6, Tata Chem Rs 346.8 million, ICICI Rs 310.5 million, Dig Equip Rs 289.3 million, Glaxo India Rs 273.9 million, and Telco Rs 259.9 million in the specified counters.

Good transactions were observed at Software Sol (Rs 134.9 million), Him Fut Comm (Rs 80.7 million), DSQ Software (Rs 74.6 million), Wipro (Rs 58.7 million), BFL Software (Rs 55 million), Cipla (Rs 37.3 million), Silver Line (Rs 27.2 million), Morepen Lab (Rs 25.9 million), HCL Infosys (Rs 23.9 million), Ipca Labs (Rs 19.9 million) at the 'B1' counter.

The annual general body meeting of the exchange will be held tomorrow to discuss the depository issue.

UNI