Inaugurating the screen-based mock trading, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) executive director Pratip Kar said that the stock exchanges in India must upgrade their technology inputs to global standard so that the system could identify the emerging crisis in the markets and must have the ability to insulate these crisis from spreading to other sectors of the economy through speedy action and transparency.

The series of recent crisis in overseas markets affected our markets in limited way because our linkages with global markets were relatively weak, he observed. In order to create confidence among the investors Kar called for a rapid technological upgradation in trading, delivery, settlement of shares and financial payment system. Sebi has initiated a dialogue with Reserve Bank of India and government authority to allow the stock exchanges to acquire technical facilities from the department of telecommunications for electronic funds transfer at various bank branches in major cities.Later, addressing a press conference, ISE managing director, Joseph Massey, said that ISE would start formally enrolling the member brokers, traders and dealers only after getting the final recognition from the Sebi in the next fortnight.

After the completion of members registration by September end, the exchange would go live for real-time trading in equity and shares

Later in the next six months to one year, the exchange would introduce products like derivative and forward trading of scrips in dematerialised forms.

The high-tech inter-connected stock exchange which had received in-principle approval from Sebi on October 22 last year, has invested about Rs 7.5 crore so far for the installation of technical expertise which included Indigo Technologies and HCL Comnet Linking 15-regional stock exchanges and other members through the common infrastructure platform.

The exchange proposed to invest a total sum of Rs 15 crore. V Shankar, whole time director of the exchange, informed that the exchange has set up a committee to design an index comprising about 40 to 60 active scrips with high market capitalisation in the next couple of months.

The index will have base year either 1993-94 or 1994-95. M R Mayya, advisor to ISE and former executive director of Bombay Stock Exchange said that the ISE would create greater liquidity in the market and would achieve a daily business turnover of Rs 150-200 crore in the very first few months.

At present, the total volume of all regional stock exchanges is in the region of around Rs 250 crore. Of the 22 stock exchanges in the country, ISE member stock exchanges are Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Channai, Cochin, Coimbatore, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana, Madhya Pradesh (Indore), Magadh (Patna), Mangalore, Saurashtra Kutch (Rajkot), Uttar Pradesh (Kanpur) and Vadodara stock exchange.