Leading bourse NSE on Monday said it has introduced facilitation of subscription in State Development Loans (SDLs) through its e-Gsec platform that will enable retail participation in securities issued by state governments. The e-Gsec platform was launched by the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in April last year, to allow retail investors to invest in government securities and hold them in existing demat accounts.SDLs are dated securities issued by state governments through normal auctions similar to the auctions conducted for dated securities issued by the central government.The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) conducts auctions for such securities on a weekly basis where 10 per cent of the notified amount is allotted for eligible investors under the scheme for non-competitive bidding (NCB).The interest on SDL is received at half-yearly intervals and the principal is repaid on the maturity date.The exchange acts as facilitator in NCB route to aggregate the bids received from retail investors and submits a single bid to RBI. The exchange has been offering G-sec and T-bills issued by central government from April 2018 to facilitate retail participation in these securities."NSE has been successfully facilitating retail participation in government securities through NSE e-Gsec platform for more than a year now. Adding SDLs in the current offerings will further add to the variety of investment avenues at NSE for greater retail participation in fixed income products," the exchange's MD and CEO Vikram Limaye said in a statement.Limaye further said "NSE will continue to offer vanilla retail products leveraging on its robust technology and retail distribution capabilities".NSE's wide presence and reach through its members along with investor awareness and education initiatives is likely to bring higher participation by retail in this asset class, helping issuers to diversify their investor base, he noted.