Mumbai: Buoyed by a sharp rally in pharma shares, the Sensex shot up and once again crossed the 6,000-mark, before ending at a four-week high of 6,011.66, up by a whopping 74.70 points, at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) today (Feb 13, 2004) on renewed buying by institutional investors and operators, cutting off overnight decline.

Pharma stocks like Cipla, Ranbaxy, Dr Reddy, Lupin, Cadila Health, Abbott, Aventis Pharma, J B Chemical, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Torrent Pharma were the front-runner while Alembic attracted heavy buying and closed in the 20 per cent upper circuit band for the second successive day.

Besides pharma, most of the old-economy blue chips also found heavy support and ended with sharp to moderate gains.

Steep rise in the Sensex could be gauged by smart upsurge in index-based heavyweights like RIL, HLL, ITC, SBI, Tata Motors, Tisco, Wipro, Satyam Computer, Infosys Tech and L&T.

The BSE-30 share sensitive index resumed barely steady at 5,936.65 and immediately dropped to a low of 5,922.38. However, emergence of buying at lower levels pushed up the benchmark to a high of 6,017.01 before concluding at 6,011.66, a net rise of 1.26 per cent over yesterday's close.

The broad-based BSE-100 index also jumped by 40.53 points to end at 3111.41 from previous close of 3,070.88.

Car makers like Maruti Udyog and Tata Motors also were in keen demand on news that the domestic car sales was surged by a robust 31.1 per cent in January and cumulative (April-January 2003-04) sales went up by 27.4 per cent.

After yesterday's sell-off cement counters recovered on fresh buying support.