We'll file reply to Sebi and FinMin: Ashish Kumar Chauhan

Interview with MD & CEO, BSE

BSE MD and CEO Ashish Kumar Chauhan, who was in the eye of a storm due to the trading shutdown, said it was one of the worst outages he had seen in recent years. Addressing the media after trading resumed after three hours, Chauhan said the exchange would soon file a comprehensive report to the regulatory authorities. Edited excerpts:

Would you rate this as the worst outage any exchange has seen in the recent past?

Yes. The context that the markets had to be shut down for more than three hours speaks about the nature of the network outage. It would be the worst outage that I have seen in the past four-and-a-half years working at the BSE.

Would you be in a position to highlight the extent of loss suffered due to this?

A better way of gauging the impact would be how the investors looked at it. The investors had another platform to trade on; so they suffered minimal loses. We were also lucky that during the period the indices did not witness much movement. As such, we haven’t seen many complaints coming in from our investors about discomfort or any aberrant loses that they have made.

Have the finance ministry and markets regulator sought any reply from you?

We would be submitting an interim reply to the regulator by today (on Thursday). But, the full report that will have a proper assessment of the crisis will take a while. High-level teams from both our technology partners CISCO and HCL are present at BSE premises and preparing a root cause analysis. This report would then be placed before BSE’s technical advisory committee and later will be vetted by BSE board. After these procedures we will file a comprehensive reply to Sebi and the finance ministry.    

When the network issues first struck BSE, why wasn't the disaster cell activated?

Disaster recovery takes time and does not work like an on-off switch. The physical movement of data takes two-three hours. The number of primary connections went below 2,000 and as per regulations we had to shut down trading.