Indian rupee gained more than 30 paise against the US dollar in opening trades on Friday on the back of weakness in the greenback.

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At 09:15 AM, the rupee was trading at 73.78 a dollar, up 34 paise, from its Thursday’s close of 74.12. The home currency opened at 73.80 and touched a high and a low of 73.75 and 73.84 a dollar, respectively.

On Thursday, the rupee ended higher by 8 paise after it plunged to all-time low of 74.48 per dollar during the intraday trade. Benchmark index Sensex gave up all the gains made so far this year and slumped 760 points, tracking selloff in Asia amidst growing worries over global economic growth.

Sentiment, however, improved a little on Friday, with stocks seeing a sharp recovery in the opening session.

On the domestic front, government is expected to take further steps to increase import duties on various products to curb a ballooning current-account deficit and falling rupee.

Weakness in dollar also supported rupee. The US dollar traded near its lowest level in nearly two weeks against its major peers on Friday as declining US treasury yields and further losses on Wall Street soured sentiment.

The rupee is the worst performing emerging market currency having lost almost 15 percent since January this year. Between April and September the rupee has plummeted more than 7 to the dollar.

Rising US interest rates and bond yields have encouraged investors to pull out funds from emerging markets to pocket better returns, analysts said.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) sold shares worth a net of Rs 1,096 crore Wednesday, provisional data showed.

In debt markets, the yields on the 10-year government bonds declined 0.16 percent to 7.97 percent after closing at 7.99 percent on Thursday. Bond yields and prices move in opposite directions.

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