Growth concern hits Dalal Street, Sensex tanks 150 points

For the third consecutive trading session, monsoon concerns hurt stock market sentiments. There were fears that this year’s monsoon may be the weakest in the last five years, which could hamper the harvest of crops such as sugarcane and rice.

Raghuram Rajan, an advisor to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said on Monday that poor monsoon were likely to adversely impact economic growth this year.

Earlier, taking cues from global markets, the Bombay Stock Exchange Senstive Index, or Sensex, opened 127 points higher. However, it failed to continue the upmove and closed at 15,009.77, down 150.47, or 0.99 per cent. The CNX Nifty ended at 4,437.65, down 0.98 per cent.

“Indian markets have failed to sustain the recovery and now they are exposed to monsoon-related derating. In sectors such as auto and banking, the selling pressure has been on a rise,” said Deven Choksey, managing director, KR Choksey.

According to him, the Nifty could be rangebound for sometime – in the range of 4,320-4,610 points.

Among the Sensex stocks, Mahindra & Mahindra and ACC slipped 9.12 per cent and 6.62 per cent, respectively. Hero Honda, Hindustan Unilever, Tata Motors, Maruti Suzuki and Grasim Industries were all down over 3 per cent.

The IT stocks benefited the most. Tata Consultancy Services soared 6 per cent, followed by Wipro (2.80 per cent) and Infosys (2.20 per cent). The other gainers were Tata Power (2.12 per cent) and ONGC (1.90 per cent).

The market breadth was negative. Out of 2,743 shares traded, 1,824 declined, 836 advanced and 83 were unchanged on Monday on the BSE.

Besides the information technology and technology indices, all others closed in the red. The IT index rose 2.64 per cent. The auto index continued to skid, down 4.52 per cent, and FMCG index slipped 2.96 per cent on fears that a bad monsoon would hurt demand for their products. Capital goods (2.03 per cent), realty (1.66 per cent) and consumer durables (1.49 per cent) were some of the other marginal losers.

The Hang Seng rallied 2.72 per cent and the Nikkei soared 1.08 per cent, respectively. The Shanghai Composite was flat. It slipped 0.34 per cent.

Foreign institutional investors were net sellers of Rs 639.92 crore and domestic institutional investors were net buyers of Rs 86.14 crore on Monday, according to provisional data by the BSE.