At 9:21 am, the S&P BSE Sensex rose 308.15 points (0.57 per cent) to 54,360.76 while the Nifty 50 was trading at 16,216.20, up 91.05 points (0.56 per cent).

On the Sensex pack, gains in the early trade were led by IndusInd Bank, Nestle India, Kotak Mahindra Bank, NTPC, Reliance Industries (RIL), ICICI Bank, Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC), Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv. In contrast, Asian Paints, Tech Mahindra, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), HCL Technologies, Wipro, Tata Steel, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) and Infosys were in the red.

Among the sectoral indices on NSE, the Bank Nifty was up over 1.1 per cent aided by the shares of IndusInd Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Kotak Mahindra Bank. The Nifty Financial Services index too was up nearly 1.1 per cent led by SBI Life Insurance Company, Piramal Enterprises and HDFC Life Insurance Company.

Global market

Asia stocks opened mostly in positive territory on Wednesday even as global growth concerns and weak US economic data weighed on Wall Street overnight.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.35 per cent, Australian shares were up 0.33 per cent, and Seoul and Taiwan both ticked upwards 0.61 per cent and 0.2 per cent. Hong Kong’s, Shanghai’s and China’s CSI300 indexes opened marginally higher while Japan’s Nikkei share average was down 0.18 per cent.

On Wall Street, the Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.35 per cent and the S&P 500 lost 0.81 per cent as worries returned over surging global inflation cornering central banks into aggressive rate hikes, thereby slowing growth.

-global market input from Reuters