Yogi saga: Skeletons tumble out at NSE

Technology is a tiger that everyone is riding, India’s top stock exchange NSE’s then CEO Chitra Ramkrishna had told PTI eight years ago.

At the time, she herself was riding the tiger at the helm of the National Stock Exchange, which had overtaken over 100-year-old Bombay Stock Exchange as India’s biggest bourse within a year of its launch in 1994.

Ironically, it was a major technical glitch in the NSE’S sophisticated algorithm-based superfast trading that had propelled her to the top as its first woman CEO in the maledominated world of stock trading: On the morning of October 5, 2012, NSE was hit by the so-called ‘fat finger trade’ which resulted in a trade getting executed in a fraction of a second for a whopping amount of Rs 650 crore and triggering a massive ‘flash crash’, wiping off nearly Rs 10 lakh crore from investors’ wealth in the Indian stock market within seconds.

Such was the momentum that a mandatory trading halt could be put in place only after a sudden 16 per cent crash in the benchmark index Nifty -- it missed two check-posts, first at 10 per cent and then at 15 per cent within six seconds. The madness ended after 15 minutes but still someone had to pay the price.

The head that rolled was that of NSE CEO Ravi Narain. A few months later, Narain’s baton was formally handed over to his deputy, Chitra Ramkrishna, on April 13, 2013.

Today, the 59-year-old Ramkrishna stands at the centre of an equally bizarre scandal after it was revealed that she was guided by a mysterious “Himalayan Yogi” in taking key business decisions of the exchange – decisions that impacted the business of an exchange which recorded a daily average turnover of well above Rs 2 lakh crore last year and which ranks as the world’s largest derivatives exchange.

Several people aware of the developments said on condition of anonymity that the time has now come for a deep-cleansing of this institution. (PTI)