It’s gold-rush for chartered accountants in India now. The acute shortage of CAs in India are making corporates, accounting firms and the financial services sector scramble after them with higher salaries. With sunrise sectors like infotech going for aggressive hiring, demand for CAs has shot up without matching supplies.

Sample this statistics: The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), the regulatory body for CAs in India, has only 1,30,000 registered with it and churns out nearly 8,000 CAs a year but the actual demand for them is just the double at 16,000, according to industry estimates.

And the result: entry level salaries have gone up by 60 per cent in just two years. Companies are shelling out anywhere between Rs 4 lakh to Rs 10 lakh per annum now as against Rs 2.40-6 lakh earlier.

And the booming IT industry wants the lion’s share of the available pool. In fact, three of the top six recruiters that went to ICAI’s campus this year were IT companies.

Freshers have been recruited on an average salary of Rs 6.72 lakh per annum and the maximum offer was Rs 12 lakh per annum. For instance, IT bellwether Infosys Technologies hired 250 CAs this year for its operations. It hired only 50 to 100 CAs last year.

Says Bikramjit Maitra, HR head, Infosys: ‘‘We have been hiring CAs for a long time. But now due to our growing financial services applications and BPO operations, we have been hiring them in appropriate numbers.’’

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