Indian benchmarks ended deep in red on Tuesday dragged by heavy losses in index heavyweights HDFC twins, Infosys, ITC and ICICI Bank amid sell-offs in global equities.

Bucking the overall downtrend, shares of Reliance Industries (RIL) rallied nearly 10 per cent, capping the Sensex loss to a large extent.

Apart from global concerns, investors remained jittery over domestic macro challenges amid slowing down of the economy and falling consumer demand in various sectors.

After diving nearly 700 points in the fag-end of the session, the 30-share Sensex settled at 36958.16 down by 623.75 points or by 1.66 % and then NSE Nifty was at 10925.85 down by 183.8 points or by 1.65 %.

Sensex touched intraday high of 37755.16 and intraday low of 36888.49 The NSE Nifty touched intraday high of 11145.9 and intraday low of 10901.6

On the other hand, RIL rallied 9.72 per cent to become the biggest gainer, after Mukesh Ambani on Monday announced plans to sell stakes in the firm's oil and chemicals business to Saudi oil giant Aramco and in fuel retail network to BP plc for Rs 1.15 lakh crore, and said its telecom unit Jio will begin offering fibre-based broadband services from next month.

Sun Pharma and PowerGrid were other two stocks that ended in the green.

Auto stocks plunged after SIAM reported that automobile sales in India witnessed its sharpest decline in nearly 19 years in July, dropping 18.71 per cent, rendering almost 15,000 workers jobless over the past two-three months.

The Market breadth, indicating the overall strength of the market, was weak. On BSE out of total shares traded 2884 , shares advanced were 972 while 1749 shares declined and 163 were unchanged.