The National Stock Exchange (NSE) finally listed its own shares on the BSE on Thursday, 34 years after it was incorporated and more than three decades after it was conceived as a challenge to the old order. The irony in its market debut is unmistakable. India's biggest stock exchange had to list itself on its rival, though it was just due to regulations.
The NSE was born in a very different India, when the Bombay Stock Exchange was a powerful broker-controlled institution and liberalisation was beginning to demand a capital market that could operate on a national scale. Its rise was not just a story of better technology but of entirely dismantling a way of doing business.
