PMO to hold key meeting today for creating India's 'Big Four'

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is scheduled to hold a crucial meeting on Friday to deliberate on ways to create large home-grown accountancy firms akin to the so-called ‘Big Four’, people aware of the details told ET.

The meeting—to be chaired by Shaktikanta Das, principal secretary-2 to Prime Minister Narendra Modi—will likely discuss plans to weigh necessary regulatory changes and other interventions to make it easier for domestic accounting firms to scale up, one of the people said. It will be attended by senior officials with the PMO and the corporate affairs ministry, among others.

At present, the Big Four—EY, Deloitte, KPMG, PwC—along with Grant Thornton and BDO dominate the Indian audit ecosystem, with their affiliates having handled assignments of 326 of the 486 Nifty-500 companies as of March 2025, according to a primeinfobase.com report.


The combined revenue of the Indian affiliates of the Big Four, by some industry estimates, may have exceeded as much as Rs 45,000 crore last fiscal.

The meeting comes at a time when the Modi government is making a renewed push to create large home-grown accounting firms.

The prime minister had in 2017 called for the creation of at least four large domestic firms that would be counted among the world’s top eight.

Recent developments
ET reported last week that the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) had approved on May 26 a crucial draft regulatory framework that will enable domestic chartered accountant firms to tie up with their global peers and set up units in the country.

The idea is to enable domestic firms to grow big and also acquire expertise through global tie-ups.

This framework, once notified, would also require local firms that are already affiliated with global accounting entities to register with the ICAI, which is empowered to issue such guidelines.

Currently, there is no formal framework governing such global tie-ups. Those with foreign tie-ups were earlier required to submit certain details with the ICAI by submitting a form, which was discontinued four years ago, as a formal framework on this was sought to be introduced.

As per the draft framework, an accountancy firm formed through a tie-up with an overseas entity has to register with the ICAI. It has to designate a senior member or partner having a significant stake in the firm as a nodal officer for ensuring necessary compliances.

Already, to build scale through merger of local chartered accountancy firms, the ICAI last year made two key changes to its guidelines.

Accounting firms wishing to merge were allowed up to 10 years, instead of the earlier five, to separate if things didn’t go according to plan. Similarly, no fees would be charged for freezing the names along with the corresponding firm registration number.