India's key share market index finished slightly higher Friday, finishing the week at an all-time high as investors betted on robust earnings performances by heavyweight companies in the quarter ended June 30.

Dealers said the stock market opened for the day with a small positive gap but picked up momentum in early trade as investors picked up new and old economy shares on hopes of a sharp rally in the days ahead.

The index kept surging higher for the better part of the session on sustained investments by foreign institutional investors who have pumped in over $1 billion in June after maintaining a sluggish trend in the previous two months.

The stock market barometer 30-share Bombay Stock Exchange sensitive index or Sensex closed at 7,210.77, representing a moderate gain of 16.92 points or 0.24 percent over the previous session's close.

The market benchmark bettered its previous all-time closing high of 7,193.85 touched Thursday on large-scale across the board institutional buying.

India's blue-chip equities have soared sharply higher in trade during the last couple of weeks on hopes that a normal monsoon would boost economic growth in the current fiscal in Asia's fourth largest economy.

The rally, which has made Indian bourses one of best performing stock exchanges globally in the current year, has been helped by the resolution of a seven-month ownership slugfest in private corporate behemoth Reliance Industries.

"With the end of the April-June quarter, investors are now focusing on corporate earnings results of blue-chip new and old economy companies to be unveiled in the days ahead," said an analyst with a domestic brokerage firm.

"Investors hope most frontline companies will post better than expected financial numbers on increased sales in the domestic and overseas markets," said the analyst.

A string of Indian companies like Infosys Technologies, Wipro and Tata Motors will start unveiling April-June quarterly financial numbers from the first week of July.

The market sentiment was also boosted by an announcement Thursday that the country's economy expanded by a faster than expected rate in the first quarter of the current calendar year.

The economy recorded an impressive seven percent growth in the January-March quarter on the back of a sharp jump in agricultural output, said an official statistical agency.

The agricultural sector posted a growth of 1.8 percent in the January-March quarter, up from a fall of 0.5 percent in the previous quarter that ended Dec 31, 2004.

In the old economy sector, shares of State Bank of India, the country's largest commercial bank, gained 3.8 percent to touch Rs.708 on fresh institutional buying interest.

Shares of consumer goods major Hindustan Lever closed with a gain of 0.7 percent at Rs.164.75.