``We would be launching the gilt fund on April 1 with a minimum subscription amount of Rs 5,000,'' the chairman of Dundee Investment Management and Research , Danesh Varma said.

The gilt fund would become the second mutual fund scheme to be launched by DIMR, the asset management company of Dundee. Varma said the AMC's liquidity scheme, which was open for subscription from January 4 to February 17, collected more than Rs 8 crore which was satisfactory.

``We have completed the issue and invested the funds in various debt instruments, mainly in government securities,'' Varma said adding that from tomorrow, the scheme will become open-end with investors getting the option to redeem the units at the net asset value prices to be made public by the AMC on a daily basis.

The AMC's liquidity fund is different from gilt fundin that the former has the option to invest in corporate bonds up to 10 per cent of the fund's total corpus.

``We will submit our collection figures and other details including our investments and NAV to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) today itself,'' Varma said.

Retail investors contributed Rs 2 crore, while corporates put in the balance amount. ``The retail response to the scheme was better than what we had expected,'' Varma said. The NAV of the liquidity scheme would be at about Rs 10.17, he added.

As the liquidity scheme's minimum investment was kept at Rs 25,000, many retail investors could not invest in the scheme. ``This was one lesson we learnt from our first scheme and we have decided to reduce the minimum investment limit in gilt fund at Rs 5,000,'' Varma said.

The Dundee chief said investors were becoming more cautious to put their money in the stock market and were looking for secured investments.``Government securities provide the safest possible avenue and this was themain reason for our decision to concentrate on schemes aimed at gilts,'' Varma said. Dundee is also looking at getting the schemes rated by credit rating agencies like ICRA or CARE.