The Bombay Stock Exchange. (AP)

Mumbai, May 8: A stock analyst from Pune has decided to take the Dalal Street Bronze Bull by its horns in a legal battle over the term “sensex”, the biggest brand identity of Asia’s oldest bourse.

Deepak M. Mohoni, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta who runs a stock trading consultancy firm, has filed a petition in a Pune district court claiming that he, and not the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), owns the coinage of the term “sensex” to describe the bourse’s bellwether index.

Mohoni filed the case after the BSE, housed on Mumbai’s Dalal Street with the Bronze Bull as its symbol, challenged his application with the Registrar of Trademarks for a patent on the word.

BSE sources said the exchange was certain to challenge Mohoni’s claim in court since it concerns its brand identity. “You can shorten it for usage, but how can anyone else claim to own what is BSE’s name? Mohoni hasn’t even registered it in his name either. We have registered it and that’s why he has moved court,” said an official.

BSE spokesperson Kalyan Bose, however, refused to speak about the case. “The matter is sub judice. We can’t comment on it,” Bose said.

The sensex is a value-weighted bellwether index composed of the 30 largest and most actively traded stocks, representative of various sectors, on the Bombay bourse. These companies account for around one-fifth of the market capitalisation of the exchange.

Speaking to The Telegraph on the phone from Pune, Mohoni said he coined the word “sensex” as an abbreviation for the Bombay Sensitive Index during his work as a columnist with a business magazine. “I found ‘Bombay Sensitive Index’ too long a term, and asked the editor if I could abbreviate it. A number of international stock indices have attractive nicknames — the Footsie for the London index for instance,” he said.

Mohoni went on to write columns and technical analysis for other business publications, and says the word “sensex” soon caught the fancy of the media. “If you go through archives of newspapers, you will find that they started using ‘sensex’ regularly after 1992-93. It was not until 1995 that the BSE began referring to the index as ‘sensex’ in its official publications,” claimed Mohoni.

The analyst said he had no problems with the use of the word “sensex” in the public domain, but felt the need to patent it only after learning that the BSE had applied for registering it as a trademark.

“The BSE held a news conference about its plans for trademark registration. But I learnt about it five or six months ago. I sought legal advice, and decided that either ‘sensex’ should remain in the public domain or I should own it, since I coined it, to protect the word from being appropriated by someone else,” Mohoni said.

Therefore, he explained, he decided to register the coinage with the Registrar of Trademarks. He claims the BSE authorities got wind of it and served him a legal notice to withdraw it. This forced Mohoni to file a court petition.

Asked if he thought he had a strong case, Mohoni said: “There is no question of proving it. Everything is in the public domain. BSE was not using the term in its official publications before 1995. Even newspapers were using it before BSE. My contention is I am not claiming the ownership of the Bombay Sensitive Index. I am challenging BSE’s attempt to trademark the term ‘sensex’. They can’t trademark it since they haven’t coined it.”