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Sensex shoots up 70.23 points

Pharmaceuticals firms lead the uptrend in the capital market, leading brokers said that being the last day of settlement at the National Stock Exchange, bull operators squared up their positions. he software counters, which were firming up for a couple of weeks, suffered a setback on hectic profit booking.

Mirroring the bullish trend, the BSE Sensitive index opened at higher at 4235.37 points improved further to 4285.57 points before closing down at 4280.96 points, showing a net gain of 70.23 points as compared to previous close of 4210.73 points.

The marketmen felt that stability is back at the Centre after the dismissal of Buta Singh by Prime Minister A B Vajpayee as demanded by AIADMK leader Jayalalitha that ministers facing charges should be dropped from the ministry.

The broadbased BSE index also gained by 35.51 points to 1889.93 points over the last working day's close of 1854.42 points.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices also increased by 08.30 and 03.48 points to 429.41 and 180.08 points as compared to yesterday's close of 421.11 and 176.60 points respectively.

The extraordinary general body meeting of Reliance Industry Limited on April 27 also improved the sentiment of the investors who are expecting favourable and impressive results.

The Reserve Bank of India's announcement of the date of credit policy yesterday affected the capital market, brokers added.

The volume of the business was good. The total turnover on the system was Rs 16 billion involving 68.4 million shares in 188,609 trades. Out of 6,997 scrips a total number of 2,206 scrips were traded.

ITC registered the highest volume of Rs 2.8 billion, followed by RIL Rs 1.3 billion, Hind Lever Rs 87.89 million, Castrol Ind Rs 806.9 million, SBI Rs 677.4 million, Satyam Comp Rs 627.4 million, Tata Tea Rs 626.5 million, Glaxo India Rs 615.8 million, Tata Chem Rs 406.7 million, NIIT Rs 250.3 million, ACC Rs 247.4 million, ICICI Rs 219.6 million and Sterlite Rs 211.9 million in the specified counters.

Among other active scrips were BFL Softwar Rs 52.3 million, Software Sol Rs 46.4 million, Wipro Rs 45.3 million, Bausch and Lomb Rs 39.5 million, Hoech Mar Ro Rs 28.3 million, Aptech Rs 25.2 million, Cipla Rs 21.9 million, Astra Idl Rs 16.4 million, Bank of Punjab Rs 14.5 million, Tata Infotec Rs 12.4 million, Silverline Rs 12.2 million, Federal Bank Rs 11.8 million at 'B1' segment.

UNI