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Select equity prices recovered on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Wednesday following short covering by bear operators and limited investment made by the foreign institutional investors.

The meeting between pprime Minister I K Gujral and industrialists at New Delhi on Tuesday changed the sentiment of the market, leading brokers said, and added that they may get new packages including duty-free import of capital goods.

An amendment of the Urban Land Ceiling Act also improved the market trading.

The favourable announcement of half-yearly results of Reliance, ICICI, and Ponds aided the uptrend, they said.

Mirroring the uptrend, the BSE Sensitive Index (30 scrips) opened slightly higher at 4015.50 points, touched the day's high of 4042.69 points, low of 3999.14 points before closing down to 4034.55 points showing a net gain of 23.15 points as against its previous close of 4012.40 points.

The broadbased BSE National Index (100 scrips) closed at 1738.88 points over the last trading day's close of 1728.78 points gaining 10.10 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex Indices increased by 03.31 and 01.09 points to 388.00 and 178.38 points as compared to Tuesday's close of 385.69 and 177.29 points respectively.

Foreign funds manager pruchased RIL, Tata Steel, ITC and SBI shares. However, domestic institutional investoRs booked their profits at lower level on select counters, brokers said.

The market opened with an overnight covering by the bear operatoRs which pushed up the Sensex marginally, later, institutional investors joined them that shot up the Sensex. But, in the trading session domestic institutional investors started booking profit which drifted lower the Sensex below 4000 mark finally, bull operators and FIIs bought sizeable amount of index-based shares recovered at the fag end, they added.

The market analyst said that Wednesday's meeting of Securities and Exchange Board of India at New Delhi regarding the re-introduction of modified badla trading recommended by the J R Verma Committee who may have favourable outcome was another reason for the improvement of market sentiments.

The total turnover on the screen-based trading system was Rs 8.2 billion involving 30.5 million shares.

Reliance registered the highest turnover of Rs 3.3 billion followed by ITC Rs 1.2 million, Tata Tea Rs 908.7 million, TISCO Rs 569.4 million, SBI Rs 463.3 million, ICICI Rs 176.9 million, Castrol India Rs 152.9 million, TELCO Rs 147.4 million, ACC Rs 137.3 million, Hind Lever Rs 74.8 million, MTNL Rs 66.9 million, Hero Honda Rs 58.6 million, BHEL Rs 55.6 million, Bajaj Auto Rs 49.7 million, BSES Rs 43.5 million at the specified counters.

Good transactions were observed at Infosys Tech, Reliance Pet, Satyam Comp, Software Sol, NIIT, Balrampur Ch, Munjal Showa, ICICI Bank Corporation, LML Limited, Aptech Limited, Ingersoll, Elecon Eng, Wipro, Punjab Tractor, Dig Equip, Infotech Ent, Reliance Petro, Gas Auth India, Cyber System and Orient Infor counters in 'B1' counters.

UNI