The Securities and Exchange Board of India has decided that there will be no stock trading at stock exchanges in India on 31 December this year. The idea is to avoid Y2K glitches as the calendar rolls over into the year 2000.

A mock trading and settlement session will be held on 1 January to test all the systems for Y2Kcompliance. (The Y2K problem, as you would know by now, will occur on earlier systems programmed with the earlier-generation software, which coded the year with just the last two digits instead of all four, to save on memory and program size. But come year 2000 and these programs will misbehave -- they will show just '00' in the year's slot.).

Now this may set panic bells ringing, if it has not already done so (see report: ) and companies and institutions are making special efforts to avoid any panic over the fallout of the Y2K problem. For this, Sebi plans to put up on its website (www.sebi.com) the Y2K compliance levels of the systems at all stock exchanges by the end of this month.

Sebi is also planning to bar those exchanges that are not compliant by 30 November 1999 and to block the terminals of all brokers who are not compliant by the same date.