The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) on Friday held a meeting of senior government officials to give a push to the vision of creating large Indian advisory firms that can compete with the Big Four — EY, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Deloitte.
Chaired by Shaktikanta Das, principal secretary to the PM, the meeting saw participation of Deepti Gaur Mukherjee, secretary at the ministry of corporate affairs; Arvind Shrivastava, revenue secretary; M. Nagaraju, secretary at the department of financial services; Ajay Seth, secretary at the department of economic affairs; and Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the economic advisory council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM).
Sources said that the key agenda of the meeting was to remove the hurdles and create enabling environment for the Indian chartered accountancy (CA) firms to grow and compete in the global advisory and audit arena.
In 2017, prime minister Narendra Modi had called for establishing four big Indian accounting firms that can make up the world’s ‘Big 8’. The idea of creating global Indian advisory firms is to counter the growing dominance of Big Four firms who control a large chunk of the audit and advisory business in India. For instance, the top audit firms cemented their position in FY25 with corporate India preferring to get their audit work done by Big 6 firms. As per the primeinfobase.com, the top six audit firms handled 326 assignments of the 483 Nifty-500 companies as on March 2025. Their dominance has continued from FY24 when they also audited 67% of the Nifty 500 universe.
Experts said that India CA firms are subject to a lot of restrictions currently. For example, if an Indian CA firm has to become a global firm, it would have to do partnerships with overseas firms because it can’t set up its own audit firm in the UK or in the US because it needs to give 51% voting to the locally-qualified CAs in those countries. However, that’s not possible today as it violates the ICAI’s rules that mandate all partners to be Indians in the firm.
Though some recent regulatory steps have been taken to accelerate the growth of domestic CA firms. ICAI has recently approved draft guidelines for overseas network, and the same will be released shortly for the public exposure.