Bombay Stock Exchange - epitomising India's growth

MUMBAI: Having traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) for decades, Brijmohan Sagarmal Agarwal, 85, recalls how the 132-year-old bourse has grown to epitomise corporate India's development since independence.

"The BSE at that time was housed in a four-story building and the trading ring was on the ground floor," recalls the resident of suburban Mumbai who has seen the trading system transform from loud cries by brokers to the sophisticated computer deals.

"During the 1940s, my family was a member of the cotton exchange, bullion exchange, oilseed and grain trade. All these more or less closed in 1957 and we became members of BSE. Since then we have been here," Brijmohan told.

"Share trading or brokerage in those days was done on speculation where I had some experience. The trading volume was low and the number of people involved was also few with a few scrips," he remembers.  Tata Steel, Century Textiles, Gujarat Fertilizer, Indian Iron, National Rayon and Hindustan Motor were among the few, he recollects, as opposed to 7,707 scrips that trade on it daily today.

"In fact, there was no television or computer to track the status of the markets. There was no system for gauging the sensitivity of the market as there was no Sensex or similar index."

Today, as India celebrates 60 years of independence, the bourse has weathered a horrific bomb blast targeted at its premises and several scams to emerge as one of the top bourses globally.

It operates one of the largest private networks in India, comprising a local area network and a wide area network connecting 417 cities by way of a V-Sat network to facilitate trading.

It has also emerged as a separate corporate entity as against a membership-based organisation earlier. On any given weekday, more than 10,000 terminals at 7,500 brokerages come alive to trade in the 7,707 scrips.

The Pheroze Jeejeebhoy Towers at Dalal Street, where the present-day exchange is located, is the most televised structure in the country-edging out the Taj Mahal and Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace.  "Today every information on stock trading is available on TV and the Net and it is not difficult to gauge the market trend as the BSE has several indices," says Santkumar Agarwal, who has now taken over the reins from his father Brijmohan.

Kicking off in 1875 as the Native Share and Stock Brokers Association under a banyan tree, six people started trading in the stocks of the British East India Company and a few commodities.

In 1956, it became the first stock exchange in the country to obtain permanent recognition from the government of India under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act and turned into a corporate entity in 2005.  The Sensex itself was born in 1986 as a representative index for Indian shares with a basket of 30 constituent stocks drawn from a sample of large, liquid and representative companies.

Today, as the country is running towards a double-digit growth, the Sensex, in many ways, has come to represent the growth of the Indian corporate in particular, and the country's overall economic development in general.  Last month, the key index crossed the magical 15,000 points. And veterans like Agarwal are gung-ho on its future.

"Like the good old days India is again fast becoming a golden sparrow. I feel by the end of 2008 or even earlier, the Sensex should touch 20,000."