After a nine-month slump, the stock market has come roaring back here, and corporate India is starting to take advantage. Companies and their investment bankers are lining up a series of initial public offerings to tap into the rising confidence of foreign and domestic investors in the Indian market. The benchmark S&P Nifty stock index is up about 80 percent since early March. On Friday, a power company closed a $625 million initial offering, the largest in the country in a year and a half. As of Friday evening, orders had been placed for 22 times as many shares as the company, Adani Power, was offering. Bankers expect the Adani Power deal to be quickly followed by a $1.25 billion offering by a state-owned hydroelectric power company. Other companies planning to sell shares include a state-owned oil company, an electric scooter concern and a wedding products company. 'Right now it looks very good for IPOs,' said Chengalath Jayaram, an executive director at Kotak Mahindra Bank. 'For investors' point of view, there is a lot of pent-up demand.' As in many other emerging markets, stocks here fell sharply starting last year as the global financial crisis spread and deepened. The Nifty tumbled 60 percent from its early 2008 peak to late October. But in the last few months, the market has shot up on optimism that the recovery would come sooner in India, China and other developing nations, than in the United States and Europe. Foreign investors, who pulled back after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, have poured several billion dollars into the Indian stock market in recent months. But the rally has raised fears of a stock bubble, not unlike recent concerns in China, where benchmark stock indexes are up 80 percent for the year. 'I still am figuring out why the market has again almost doubled, and I can't find reasons,' said Prithvi Haldea, chairman and chief executive of Prime Database, which tracks public offerings and the market. 'Clearly the markets are much ahead of the underlying economy.' But for now, investors in India seem undeterred. Since April, Indian companies, including several real estate developers that are still struggling to sell homes and other projects, have raised $3.25 billion from institutional investors through private placements, according to Icici Securities. As more public offerings begin, individuals are investing with gusto. Retail demand for Adani Power shares, for instance, was about twice as high as the supply of shares dedicated for those investors. The offering, which was managed by DSP Merrill Lynch, also drew big institutional investors like T. Rowe Price and Credit Suisse, who were allowed to place orders ahead of others but have to hold onto their shares for a longer period of time under new Indian regulations for anchor investors. Adani Power, based in Ahmedabad, is building two large power plants in Western India and plans to construct two more. It is part of a conglomerate, Adani Group, that is also involved in ports, coal mining, real estate, power trading and agriculture processing. The current interest in IPOs appears muted compared with the frothy days of 2008, when investors clamored to buy stock in Reliance Power, a company that had not begun building any plants at the time but was backed by one of the country's best-known executives, Anil Ambani. Demand for shares in that $3 billion offering was 70 times greater than the supply. The stock fell more than 67 percent from its peak to its trough in October. It has since recovered some of that value, but is still about 39 percent down from its highest close. Bankers say fears of a bubble are overblown because companies are raising money at far lower prices than in the offerings of 2007 and 2008. 'Certainly there is no frenzy either among institutional investors or retail investors,' A. Murugappan, an executive director at Icici Securities, said. 'They are slowly getting their confidence back.' Moreover, most companies now entering the market with public offerings, including Adani Power, had obtained regulatory approval some months ago and were waiting for the markets to improve. In the last four months, only three companies have filed new applications to list their shares, Haldea said. 'It's very, very shallow,' he said of the appetite for initial public offerings. 