We had received a lot of feedback from various stakeholders. The Board considered all the views that had been received as well as the proposal that we had put up. It has been decided that the SME exchange can be either in the form of a new exchange, or an exchange trading platform of an existing exchange, and that there will be competition in this area. So, it is not going to be one exchange that would be licensed by us to be set up as an SME exchange.

The board also decided that the eligibility criteria would be made public by us. Then the exchange, which is newly setup for this purpose, or an exchange that is proposing to setup an existing exchange, which is proposing to set up a platform, can apply and Sebi will then consider those applications.

The board also considered the issue of norms that we have laid down for shareholding by individual shareholders in the demutualised stock exchanges. Again a discussion paper on this was put out by Sebi. As you are all aware the proposal in that discussion paper was to enhance this limit from 5% to 15% for some category of shareholders.

So, the board approved this limit from 5% to 15% for six categories i.e. public financial institutions, stock exchanges, depositories, clearing corporations, banks, and insurance companies.

It also discussed the issue of the entire framework that governs the participation in our markets by what we call FIIs, or foreign institutional investors. The board was of the view that the entire structure needs a comprehensive review. For this purpose, it was decided that we will put out a policy paper, which will be in the public domain for receiving comments from people.

The board also reviewed the decisions of October 2007 with regard to the offshore derivative instruments, or Participatory Notes as they are popularly called. It was decided at that time that these decisions would be subsequently reviewed on the basis of the data that we receive.

On the basis of this review, the board decided that the restrictions on ODIs on derivatives will be removed. Also, the restrictions on having only 40% ODI in the cash investments will also be removed. So, both restrictions that were put for offshore derivative instruments have been decided to be removed. They are no longer applicable.

The board in October 2007 had also decided that we will expedite the process of registering FIIs and sub-accounts so that people come and directly register here in the Indian market. It reviewed that position as well and it was reported to the board that during the last 11 months – October 31, 2007 till now – 397 FIIs and 1,160 sub-accounts have been registered. So, we found that that process is going on smoothly.

These were three important decisions that were taken in the meeting today.