After two days of small upticks, benchmark indices opened flat with Coal India, DLF and HCL Tech, Infosys, BPCL and NTPC holding in green. At 09.17 AM, the Sensex was up 12.06 points at 19620.14, and the Nifty rose 4.55 points to 5937.50.

Tech stocks continue to perform with HCL Tech rising almost 1 percent followed by Infosys and TCS. Wipro was, however, down 1.5 percent. The stock market will move out of Nifty W.E.F April 1.

Maruti Suzuki was a star performer in the auto pack for the past few sessions and appears to be in a correction mode, coming off more than 2 percent in the morning trade on profit booking. Tata Steel too was slammed after its poor third quarter numbers. Other stocks weighing on the bourses include  SBI and Bharti Airtel.

The midcap segment was trading flat with negative bias. Cholamandalam was the top runner with 2.8 percent gains followed by Biocon which rose on news that the company had forged a tie up with Mylan.

Meanwhile, in a late Wednesday night development, SEBI cracked down on Sahara group , freezing more than 100 bank accounts of two of its companies. Sources said that the immovable assets of the two companies were also frozen.