Late buying in heavyweight stocks from investors helped the benchmark equity indices to end higher on Tuesday. Markets lingered in a flat territory for good part of the first half of the day in the absence of any major trigger from global equities but unexpected buying in the latter part of the day helped the indices to notch up some good gains. The BSE Sensex reclaimed the 17,000-mark in trade while the S&P CNX Nifty has inched closer to 5150-level. Recovery in European markets after initial weakness also fuelled the rally in the domestic markets. Once again the entire trading session was dominated by big boy -- Reliance Industries (RIL) -- which surged almost two and a half percent on reports that it was speeding up acquisition talks of LyondellBasell. This boosted confidence among investors and they put all apprehensions behind them to do value picking in realty, consumer durables and metal stocks. Bharti Airtel received good response from marketmen for third day in a row. Reliance Communications, which was battered in trade on under reporting of revenues during 2006-07 and 2007-08, also witnessed smart recovery in the last hour of trade. Finally, the 30-share BSE Sensex soared 244.54 points or 1.44% to settle at 17,227.68, while the 50-share S&P CNX Nifty rose 81.25 points or 1.60% to end at 5147.95. The market breadth on the BSE was strong; the advance-decline ratio stood at 1.96:1. The BSE Sensex touched a high and a low of 17,237.79 and 16,964.11, respectively. Bharti Airtel up 4.05%, DLF up 3.53%, Tata Motors up 2.78%, Hindalco Industries up 2.56% and RIL up 2.33% were the major gainers on the Sensex. On the other hand, SBI down 0.78%, Maruti Suzuki down 0.45% and Hero Honda down 0.14% were the major losers on the Sensex. The BSE Mid-cap and Small-cap indices advanced 1.31% and 1.38%, respectively. The Indian government said on Monday that the issue of bank consolidation will ultimately be decided by the banks themselves and it had put no pressure or timeline on the banks in this regard. Consolidation in the banking industry has been a controversial issue in recent days with policy makers being divided on how to proceed with bank mergers. Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said in the lower house of the Indian Parliament on Monday that the government has not issued any direction to state-owned banks on consolidation and it was up to the banks themselves to decide on mergers. The main gainers on the BSE sectoral space were Realty up 3.27%, Consumer Durables (CD) up 2.29%, Metal up 2.15%, TECk up 1.84% and Oil & Gas up 1.73%. Ansal Prop (up 12.22%) from Realty, Gitanjali Gems (up 4.50%) from CD, Jai Corp (up 7.44%) from Metal, Balaji Tele (up 6.75%) from TECk and HPCL (up 4.24%) from Oil & Gas were the main gainers on the respective indices. There were no losers in the BSE sectoral space. The Indian monetary authority has said that recent surge in capital inflows into the country reflected confidence of global investors in the Indian growth story. Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said that although measures to manage inflows could not be ruled out at some stage, they were not of immediate concern. Indian economy has returned to strong growth swiftly after being hit by the global downturn last year. GDP growth has improved sequentially over the last three quarters and has hit 7.9% in the September quarter, surprising the markets and policy-makers alike. The S&P CNX Nifty touched a high and a low of 5152.55 and 5058.90, respectively. Unitech up 4.95%, Bharti Airtel up 4.71%, DLF up 3.41%, Ambuja Cement up 3.16% and Jindal Steel up 2.85% were the top gainers on the Nifty. While, Cipla down 0.94%, SBI down 0.64%, Maruti Suzuki down 0.38%, Ranbaxy down 0.31% and Hero Honda down 0.23% were the top losers on the broadly followed index. India's Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh said on Monday that the country will touch 9% growth again by 2011. Stressing the strong fundamentals of the economy, the PM said that India had shown the way out of crisis. He expected the economy to grow close to 7% in the 12 months of ending March-2009. Dr Singh said that India's high saving and investment rates gave clear indications that the economy was capable of expanding at 9%. "The Indian economy, despite the global slowdown, has been growing at a rate of 6.7% and this year it will be growing at a rate of about 7%... Our savings and investment rates point to our ability to go back to the growth path of 9% per year in about two years time,' said the PM. Among European markets France's CAC 40 added 0.25%, Germany's DAX surged 0.31% and Britain's FTSE 100 gained 0.14%. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said on Monday that the surging food inflation in India was a supply side problem and it will have to use some fine tuning approach to deal with the issue. There has been an increasing pressure on the RBI to check the surging food inflation whilst ensuring that economic growth was also maintained. Governor of the Indian monetary authority Duvvuri Subbarao said on Monday that India's food price inflation was a supply-side issue and conventional tools of monetary policy were generally inefficient to check it. 'There are supply-side forces working on inflation... monetary policy is an ineffective instrument to rein in supply-side inflation,' said the governor. The Asian markets closed on a negative note on Tuesday. Hang Seng suffered the most among the regional peers while the Japanese markets declined after the shipping firms dropped on report that the Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index fell for the first time in last four days. Shanghai Composite closed at 3,296.66, down by 35.23 points or 1.06%, Hang Seng closed at 22,060.52, down by 264.44 points or 1.18%, Nikkei 225 closed at 10,140.47 down by 27.13 points or 0.27%, Seoul Composite closed at 1,627.78, down by 4.87 points or 0.30% and the Taiwan Weighted closed at 7,768.71, down by 6.93 points or 0.09%. The lone gainer of the Asian pack, Straits Times closed higher by 8.52 points or 0.30% to 2,805.50. | 
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