NEW DELHI: Telecom stocks Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) (up 2.50 per cent), Tejas Networks (up 1.94 per cent), Bharti Airtel (up 1.93 per cent) and GTL (up 1.87 per cent) climbed up to 2 per cent in morning trade on Thursday, keeping the sectoral index in the green.

The BSE Telecom index was trading 0.65 per cent up at 1,360 around 09:55 am (IST).

Shares of Idea Cellular (up 0.75 per cent), ITI (up 0.45 per cent) and Tata Communications (up 0.11 per cent) were also trading with gains.

Telecom stocks rose after the central government raised spectrum cap to 35 per cent from 25 per cent for the mobile carriers. Moreover, telecom operators are now allowed to pay for spectrum in 16 instalments instead of 10, Reuters reported.

However, Aksh Optifibre (down 4.88 per cent), GTL Infrastructure (down 4.82 per cent), Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (down 1.67 per cent), Bharti Infratel (down 1.00 per cent), Vindhya Telelinks (down 0.97 per cent), Reliance Communications (down 0.40 per cent), Himachal Futuristic Communications (down 0.38 per cent) and OnMobile Global (down 0.22 per cent) were trading in the red around that time.

Benchmark NSE Nifty50 index was up 24 points at 10,179, while the BSE Sensex was up 100 points at 33,133.

Among the 50 stocks in the Nifty index, 23 were trading in the green, while 27 were in the red.