15,00,000 students are preparing
For a profession that is obsolete.
CA full form should be “casualty of ai”
Ten years ago, many of us could see the collapse of the CA profession. The market was getting polarised. There was the Big4 who essentially took away everything profitable. And then there were 250,000 other CAs scrambling to make a living. Behind every bank fraud was a Ca turned rich. Gujarat and Rajasthan led in bank fraud – and became the headquarters of the CA profession. Indians don’t pay for services. They pay for evasion and bank loot. Fortunately they were paying for online form uploading.
The profession was left with two options- human robots filling forms or partners in fraud. Being a CA stopped being aspirational. It reflected in the calibre of the students. Bad practices from other competitive exams got emulated. Laxmi Nagar in Delhi became the equivalent of Kota for IIT. A sweat shop in a slum preparing kids to pass the exam. Not to become better professionals. Soft skills didn’t keep pace. Communication skills were non existent. Ai skills ??? Are you joking !!! The profession was dead.
Then a bunch of Mumbai based CAs decided to take things on their own hands. ICAI had been badly compromised. NFRA was out to slaughter it. And rightly so. The Mumbai seniors wanted to ride on the IIT case study. ICAI opposed it. Multidisciplinary firms with engineers as partners were approved but never implemented. Vested interests worked to destroy the profession. The Big4 violated the code of ethics with impunity. ICAI did not discipline. Individuals benefitted, not the profession.
Finally realisation dawned on both the govt and the profession. The govt supported the creation of Indian firms as challengers to the Big4. Big4 no longer gets tenders issued on restrictive terms. Govt business will not automatically go to Big4.
But the challenge of reskilling the profession remains. And that is where SuperCA comes in. It is a three year program that runs parallel to the CA course. Articleship is with empanelled technology empowered firms. Soft skills are focused on. Visiting faculty ensures real world understanding of capital markets, venture capital and investment banking – professions which are ai resilient. But which require soft and tech skills. Details are on forum.iitcouncil.org under superCA. Designed to compete with an IIM MBA at half the cost – the program offers a tech syllabus like no other but comes with a rigour like the IITs.
Hard work.
With rich reward