The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) is organising a two-day International Conference on ‘Jnana Yajna- The Quest for Excellence’ from October 22 at HICC in Hyderabad. Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu will inaugurate the conference, which will see participation from Arjun Meghwal, Union Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs, among others.

ICAI President M Devaraja Reddy and ICAI Vice-President Nilesh S Vikamsey said, for the first time, the International Conference is being held in Hyderabad and around 3,500 delegates from five regional centers, 154 branches and from 28 chapters from abroad will attend the conference.

“It will deliberate on various issues including GST, ways to cope with paperless auditing, transferring price, code of conduct, building competitiveness for small firms, enhancing trust in CAs etc,” they said.

A committee instituted for education and syllabus revision is coming out with a new syllabus (for CA) in a month’s time and it will get launched by the Prime Minister, Reddy said adding the revised syllabus will have relevant subjects like IT, IFRS, Fraud accounting, to meet the new challenges for the CA profession.

“We have made 12th standard as the basic qualification for registration for CA, as earlier Class 10 students were not in a frame of mind to decide on their career and often parental and societal pressure made them pursue the course, which resulted in several dropping out mid-stream or not clearing the course due to general lack of interest in the subject,” he said.

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They further said, “To combat the menace of coaching institutes, we have changed the exam format from 200 marks of objective type questions to 400 marks comprising of 200 marks for objective type multiple choice questions and 200 marks for subjective type questions. Students going through Coaching institute rote learning will be filtered out through this.”

Reddy said, “We are producing CAs for global requirements, there are 30,000 CAs trained in India working abroad in Gulf and African countries. Currently, there are 2.6 CAs practising, but the demand for CAs by 2020 will be 10 lakh.”