Waiting for a national stock market in India

Today was another reminder that India still does not have a national stock market. The Indian stock markets are closed because Mumbai goes to the poll today. The country as a whole goes to the polls on ten different days spread over more than a month. Either the stock market should be closed on ten days or on none.

It is high time that the regulators required that the exchanges should operate out of their disaster recovery location when Mumbai has a holiday and most of the country is working. That would also be a wonderful way of testing whether all those business continuity plans work as nicely on the ground as they do on paper. But something tells me that this is unlikely to happen anytime soon

Two decades ago, we abolished the physical trading floor in Mumbai. But the trading floor in Mumbai lives on in the minds of key decision makers, and it will take long to liberate ourselves from the oppression of this imaginary trading floor.

Posted at 6:13 pm IST on Thu, 24 Apr 2014         permanent link

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