A joint technical committee set up by the Reserve bank of India and the Securities Exchange Board of India is looking into the issue of launching interest rate futures, a SEBI official said.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the inauguration of the the MCX Stock Exchange website in Hindi and Gujarati for currency derivatives, SEBI executive director R K Nair said interest rates futures are likely to be introduced soon.

The meetings of the technical committee has been going on for some time and ''it is matter of time, we will have interest rates futures," he said.

Interest rate futures are contracts linked to interest-bearing assets like treasury bills and the the size of interest rate contracts globally is over $45-trillion, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

The introduction of interest rate futures is expected to help corporates to better discover interest rates and market risks.

SEBI, meanwhile, asked stock exchanges to recover any shortfall in the one per cent security deposit listed companies have to maintain with them immediately.

Under SEBI rules, every company proposing to issue new securities has to deposit an amount equal to one per cent of the total value of such securities with the exchange.

The regulation permits issuing companies to pay half the security deposit in cash and the other half in bank guarantees. However, in several cases the bank guarantees have expired without the exchanges making efforts to recover the amounts, SEBI said in a circular.

SEBI has asked the exchanges to invoke such bank guarantees before they expire, or demand from the companies fresh bank guarantees against those which have lapsed.