Goodwill Investor Education Initiative : Goodwill’s Eagle Eyes !
NSE glitch –more than one month has gone, still no clarity !
The national Stock Exchange (NSE), India’s largest bourse suffered an unprecedented technical glitch on 24.2.2021 and the transactions were stopped for nearly five hours with no news about the nature of it, how long it would persist, how it had happened, why it could not be prevented, what was the B Plan for such casualties, who were primarily responsible, how much the Brokerages and the traders and investors suffered,what is the recourse for such of those who suffered monetarily, what SEBi and others were doing …a host of questions remain unanswered till date- nearly 40 days have lapsed since the diabolic event has occurred.
SEBI which is primarily in charge of investor protection has sought the report from NSE and no one knows the answers for the above raised questions till date.The five hour market shut down has led to enormous loss for the investors and whether the investor protection fund will help them. The extension of market hours by 90 minutes ewas not of any use as the brokerages with no clue as to when the markets will open, if at all it could, have auto- squared off the positions of the clients resulting in most of the cases a huge loss.
Market watchers say that this is the third major glitch on the NSE in the last five years and came a just a day prior to the expiry of the F & O contracts when the turnover peaked.
The irony is that the BSE had on that day absolutely had no issue of this kind and was active in operation much to the chagrin of the NSE investors. Investors and market pundits question the credibility of the Technical tools of NSE and why they were caught unaware of this kind of shut down and what happened to their technical competence to deal with such unforeseen calamities. Why they could not equip themselves with Plan B and not thought of interoperability with other exchanges and service providers is a rational question to be answered. NSE perhaps was lethargic in its approach towards problem solving and that too when they have suffered a similar glitch in 2017 and trading stopped for 5 hours then.
Is the SEBI serious to find out the cause of this tragedy and will it initiate steps to avoid recurrence of this kind in future is a moot question to be answered. Similarly NSE should strengthen its technical team with the fire-fighting tools to avoid such mishaps in the days to come. Will they?
