Sen panel advocates no ban on futures trading

An expert committee set up over a year ago to study if futures trading influenced commodity prices will neither recommend a ban nor favour continuing trade in essential commodities, a member of the panel said.

"The terms of reference do not include any obligation to make recommendations about the future of futures market and we don't have to say anything about whether it should continue or not," Sharad Joshi, member of the Abhijit Sen committee, told reporters here.

He said the panel members, who had a 3-4 hour long meeting today, agreed to submit a common minimum report (CMR) to Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Minister Sharad Pawar listing their views.

"The common minimum report will not have anything either stopping or permitting futures market," Joshi said.

As regards lifting of ban on futures trading in certain commodities including wheat, he said: "We don't have to say whether the ban should be lifted."

The panel will be submitting its report to the government within days of Pawar announcing in Parliament that he would take a decision on futures market if the Sen panel report was not received within 10 days.

The setting up of the committee was announced by Finance Minister P Chidambaram last year in his Budget speech for 2007-08.

Apart from Sen and Joshi, the members of the committee include IIM-Ahmedabad professor Siddharth Sinha, Forward Markets Commission member Kewal Ram and IIM-Bangalore professor Prakash Apte. The government had last year appointed the Sen panel to study the impact of futures trading on prices of agricultural commodities.