Students who successfully complete their article ship training as part of the chartered accountants' course offered by The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) can look forward to help from ICAI to start their careers. ICAI plans to offer these CAs office space free of cost for a maximum of five-years in ICAI Bhawan across India. This offer is to those CAs who are cash strapped to start their own office.

More refreshing is the vision of ICAI president Uttam Prakash Agarwal who also wants these Bhawans to double up, as professional networking hubs for CAs to meet and exchange their ideas. Inaugurating the renovated branch premises of ICAI Bhawan here on Monday, Agarwal said the Bhawans would have clubhouse facilities. "This will enable the CAs to bring their families along on weekends, and unwind," he said.

ICAI during 2009-10 has given special thrust to ensure that all its 118 branches have their own infrastructure facility. The idea of letting out office space for upcoming CAs is to help the small and medium practising professional start their careers. The enterprising CAs will find their feet within a year or two and move on to their own premises, he said and added this was an exercise aimed at capacity building of budding professionals.

Exhorting the members to display a better sense of unity and confidence about their profession and ability to eke out a dignified living from it, Agarwal said enterprising CAs have pushed up the entry level salary at the corporate level to Rs 6.91 lakh per annum this year as against Rs 5.75 lakh last year. "Recession is a state of mind and the enterprising do not have to fear anything even in these pressing times," he opined.

The chairman, infrastructure committee, ICAI, K Raghu said Agarwal has put all infrastructure related projects on fast track mode after taking over earlier this year. ICAI has released Rs 12 lakh to Mangalore branch to renovate its premises here. ICAI has also obtained 10 acres of land in Bangalore from the state and work on setting up centre of excellence would get underway there soon. "The compound walls are up," he said.

ICAI has given Rs 1 crore to the Hubli branch to enable it to start the work on its own building soon. The renovated auditorium of the Belgaum branch will be opened shortly, and the Bellary branch has been allocated Rs 50 lakh for the construction of its building. In addition, ICAI has also set up three mega computer centres of 250-seating capacity each in Mumbai to train future CA students on IT related aspects of the profession.

Taking the e-learning initiative further, Raghu said ICAI has decided to start an exclusive web casting channel from July 1. ICAI on April 19 web cast an address from director - human resources, education and research and administration of Infosys T V Mohandas Pai on global economic meltdown. ICAI will web cast talks of persons from eminent walks of life once in 15 days or every month to enable them to learn from a vast pool.