Jorhat, Aug. 11: The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) will set up a branch in Upper Assam.

The institute is the statutory body established under the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949, for the regulation of chartered accountants in India and is the second largest accounting organisation in the world.

The proposed branch of the ICAI will be the second such branch in the northeastern region after Guwahati. The institute’s president, Subodh Kumar Agrawal, is on a two-day visit to Upper Assam. He told newspersons here today that according to the request for the Upper Assam chapter of the organisation, ICAI has taken a decision to open a branch in an Upper Assam district, owing to the increase in number of students seeking to become CAs.

“We have been receiving requests to open a branch in Upper Assam for quite some time as the number of CAs in the area is on the rise in the last couple of years. Also, the number of students seeking to make a career in CA is increasing,” Agrawal said.

He added that the new branch would come up either in Jorhat, Dibrugarh or in Tinsukia district. The final decision in this regard will be taken shortly. Once the new branch comes up, CA students from Upper Assam need not go to Guwahati for the compulsory classes and orientation programmes, which are part of the three-year course syllabus. As part of the ICAI’s attempt to reach out to the Northeast, the organisation in the last three years has already opened an examination centre and computer centre in Tinsukia.

Stating that career prospects in CA was increasing in recent times, Agrawal said 25 years back there were less than 100 CAs in the Northeast, Assam in particular, which did not permit to set up a branch under the organisation’s rules. However, the ICAI has now over 1,000 members in the region and most of them are from Assam. He said there were about 6,000 students from Northeast, mostly from Assam, pursuing CA.

Agrawal said ICAI, which has 2.2 lakh members and 12 lakh students with 138 branches across India, offers the most economic course with a Rs 40,000 fee for the three-year programme, including course material. Moreover, each student gets a stipend from the CA firm in which he/she works, during the study period.

The ICAI president said each year, 1.5 lakh students across the country were joining the CA course. Agrawal said the organisation has trained Assam government officials in capacity building to deal with matters related to finance and accounts. He said the ICAI has also trained CBI and police personnel from several states to enhance their skills to investigate financial scams.

He said the ICAI has constituted a committee from its members to study rupee devaluation, current fiscal deficit, GDP growth, proposed labour and insurance sector reforms and issue of FDI. Agrawal said next month, the committee would submit the study report to the Centre.