By 9:35, the Sensex was lower by 220 points at 27,611 mark and the Nifty slipped by 64 points at 8,291 mark.

The broader markets are outperforming the benchmark indices- BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices are trading marginally positive.

On Wednesday, markets ended marginally higher to snap three day losing streak, helped by a rebound in Chinese shares, led by bank shares.

Meanwhile, foreign institutional investors were net buyers in Indian equities worth Rs 5.39 crore on Wednesday, as per provisional stock exchange data.

Further, investors have turned cautious as the government will unveil industrial production data for October 2014 and annual rate of inflation based on the combined consumer price indices (CPI) for urban and rural India for November 2014 tomorrow.

On the global front, Asian stocks fell early on Thursday as falling oil prices continued to feed into global growth concerns, while the dollar lost more ground against peers such as the yen and euro after a further drop in US bond yields.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.2% as another large drop in oil prices took a heavy toll on energy shares and hit Wall Street hard overnight.

With global crude prices suffering around 5% decline on Wednesday, the losses among energy stocks was significant enough to drag US markets by more than 1%. Concerns over political uncertainty in Greece also weighed on sentiments. Dow Jones Industrial Average index lost around 1.5% while S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indices lost 1.6% and 1.7% each.

Back home, BSE Auto and Capital Goods indices have dipped by almost 1%. Infact, all the major BSE sectoral indices are trading in positive zone.

The main losers on the Sensex are Tata Motors, GAIL, Dr Reddy’s Labs, BHEL, ONGC and ICICI Bank.

On the gaining side, Bharti Airtel, Sun Pharma, HDFC, Tata Steel and M&M have gained between 0.2-1%.