Hordes of students clog up the main roads every evening. Not an unusual sight in summers when students take a shot at the competitive examinations.
But what is unusual is that many of them belong to CA coaching centres. The Chartered Accountancy (CA) course, once considered a tough nut to crack, has reinvented itself and the bright students, who had always dreamed of a career as an engineer or a doctor, are now knocking at the doors of CA coaching centres-cum-junior colleges.
Riding on an unprecedented demand for enrolment into CA-CPT (Common Proficiency Test) conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) here, the two major CA coaching institutions have been on an expansion spree and are now short of space in Guntur. A publicity blitzkrieg has been launched to tap students from small towns, hitherto an unexplored market. As the number of students giving a shot at the CA-CPT is set to shoot up to 5,000 this June alone, Guntur has been allotted four centres on par with Vijayawada and Hyderabad.
“From Junior Inter to CA Final!” is the caption on a brochure of a CA coaching institute. Parents are being counselled to admit the students in the MEC stream in Intermediate to facilitate registration with ICAI . These are coached to take the CA-CPT entrance examination held in June and December every year. “In the wake of globalisation and opening of markets, there has been a tremendous rise in business activity. There is a huge demand-supply gap for qualified CAs,” says Anil Kumar Kavuri, Director, Sri Medha. “For a long time, there has been too much emphasis on engineering and medicine, and the time has come to look towards CA as an attractive career option. There are bright employment opportunities even for those who complete Accountancy Technician Course,” says Mattupalli Mohan, Director, Master Minds.
