The National Multi-Commodity Exchange of India Ltd announced on Friday that the commodity trade in rice and wheat would begin in the next two months.

The exchange had also been recently given permission by Forward Markets Commission to launch gold and silver futures trading.

NMCE officials today said that trading in bullion would being in the first week of October.

Kailash Gupta, managing director, NMCE said, The safekeeping arrangement for bullion would be handled by Central Warehousing Corporation.

In locations where CWC does not have a safekeeping facility they will tie up with HSBC for safety vaults.

The value of daily trade in NMCE, at present, is around Rs 150 crore (Rs 1.5 billion). Gupta refrained from estimating the increase in daily trade after bullion is introduced in the commodities market.

After almost 42 years, trading in gold has been allowed. We definitely expect a surge in the trading value after bullion is introduced.

However it would be inappropriate to estimate or try to guess the increase in the daily trade value. Gupta further said that in the domestic market, to facilitate bullion traders, NMCE has kept unit of trading and unit of delivery of gold at 100 gms and will trade only in gold and silver with .999 finesse.

Gupta highlighted NMCE s edge in providing vast storage facility. CWC, provides us access to a network of 493 warehouses with storage capacity of 9.3 million metric tonne. CWC also operates in about 25 inland clearance depots in addition to three air cargo complexes.