NEW DELHI: Telecom stocks Tejas Networks (up 5.78 per cent), Aksh Optifibre (up 3.31 per cent), Bharti Infratel (up 1.58 per cent) and Sterlite Technologies (up 1.09 per cent) were trading up during Friday's trade, keeping the sectoral index in the green.

The BSE Telecom index was trading 0.55 per cent up at 1,354 around 11:50 am (IST).

Shares of Bharti Airtel (up 0.82 per cent), Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) (up 0.69 per cent) and Idea Cellular (up 0.19 per cent) were also in the green in the telecom index.

Shares of Bharti Airtel rose after the company said it would raise Rs 3,000 crore through listed, unsecured, rated, redeemable, non-convertible debentures through private placement.

However, GTL Infrastructure (down 19.85 per cent), GTL (down 9.79 per cent), Reliance Communications (down 5.57 per cent), OnMobile Global (down 1.95 per cent), Vindhya Telelinks (down 1.32 per cent), Himachal Futuristic Communications (down 1.30 per cent), ITI (down 0.74 per cent), Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) (down 0.48 per cent) and Tata Communications (down 0.28 per cent) were in the red in the index around that time.

Sustained buying by domestic institutional investors amid a firm trend at other Asian bourses was keeping the equity benchmarks up.

The BSE Sensex was up 71 points at 33,423, while the NSE Nifty50 index was up 26 points at 10,269.

Among the 50 stocks in the Nifty50 index, 32 were trading in the green, while 17 were in the red.