With hashtags like #Dearicaipleasechange and #ICAIreforms trending all over the internet, the issue surrounding the problematic regulations of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) have come to the forefront once again.
Thousands of students, teachers and CA officials are protesting outside the ICAI office in Delhi since 23rd September 2019 demanding their right to revaluation and challenging the existing ICAI regulations. Their major demand revolves around reforming Regulation 39(4) of the CA Regulations, 1988 which according to them seems to be a major rock standing in the way of transparency and justice.
As per the above mentioned regulations, once the results of the CA examinations are published, the students are allowed to apply only for re-totalling of their marks on payment of a fixed fee and there is no provision given to them with which they can apply for revaluation.
This is not the first time when the students are protesting against this issue and the problem has been lingering on ever since December, 2018. The whole controversy sparked again a couple of days back after ICAI released its results for the CA examinations conducted in May 2019 and the students pointed out multiple errors and irregularities in the evaluation system.
The agitated aspirants have taken the matter to social media and a number of them even posted pictures of their answer sheets, obtained under RTI as an open proof of their problem. While many alleged that they were not allotted enough marks for steps, others complained that they weren’t given marks even for the MCQs that they answered correctly. Some of the exam sheets even had a mistake of over 12 marks which changed the results of many.
The protests have caught the full attention of the national media and a lot of politicians and prominent faces are resorting to twitter and other media handles to back the demands of the agitating lot.
Rahul Gandhi tweeted saying,“ Given the widespread reports of error in the evaluation of answer sheets, this demand is justified and should be supported by all political parties.”
Across India 12 Lakh CA students are fighting for their right to have their exam papers re-evaluated by ICAI.
Given the widespread reports of errors in the evaluation of answer sheets, this demand is justified & should be supported by all political parties.
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 25, 2019
Owing to the ongoing protests at over 200 different branches and the pressure building from the media, the ICAI officials broke their silence and published an announcement on their website disclosing their plans of bringing reforms to the existing regulations, a few days ago. They declared that they will completely digitize the evaluation process for CA Foundation and CA Final Exams thereby eliminating any scope of totalling errors and including Stepwise marking and Mandatory on-line test for empanelment of examiners.
But, as progressive as these reforms may sound, they have failed to appease the protestors as they want nothing but transparency in the examination system and their right to revaluation.
