Mumbai, Indian stock markets witnessed a rally during the last two hours of trade on Friday with healthy buying in the banking and finance stocks.

Both the BSE Sensex and the NSE Nifty50 closed above the psychological levels of 31,000 and 9,000 respectively.

The surge in the banking and finance stocks was on the back of the liquidity and regulatory measures announced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

The S&P BSE Banking index rose by 6.83 per cent BSE Finance index was up 5.44 per cent.

Gains on the global indices also supported the Indian market. Major Asian markets closed on a positive note and the European indices like the FTSE, CAC and DAX also ended higher.

The BSE Sensex closed at 31,588.72, higher by 986.11 or 3.22 per cent from the previous close of 30,602.61. It had opened at 31,656.68 and touched an intra-day high of 31,718.73 and a low of 30,960.94 points.

The Nifty50 on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) also ended at 9,266.75, higher by 273.95, or AA3.05 per cent from its previous close.

To mitigate the impact of economic fallout on financial liquidity due to Covid-19 pandemic, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday announced a set of new measures including a 25 basis point reduction in reverse repo rate to 3.75 per cent of Liquidity Adjustment Facility (LAF).

He also announced other measures including TLTRO 2.0 and re-financing facilities for critical institutions.

Rahul Sharma, Research Head, Equity99 said: "COVID-19 continues to be the focus of the market. Following strong global clues and expectations of a fresh set of a fiscal stimulus package, which would be bigger than the earlier one, the markets traded high but gave up some of the gains towards the end."

Deepak Jasani, Head Research at HDFC Securities, said that broad market indices like the BSE Midcap and Small Cap indices gained less, thereby underperforming the Sensex or Nifty.

On the technical front, Jasani said: "Traders will need to watch if the Nifty can now convincingly cross these trend line resistances around the 9,420-9,460 levels for further upsides in the coming week. Else, selling pressure could resume once again and push the Nifty lower."

Among the Sensex stocks, the top gainers were Axis Bank (up 13.45 per cent), ICICI Bank (9.89 per cent) and IndusInd Bank (9.13 per cent) and the major losers were Nestle India (down 3.15 per cent), Hindustan Unilever (2.14 per cent) and Tech Mahindra (1.60 per cent)