CAs back Sheila's balance sheet

In an unusual move, prominent chartered accountants in Delhi, including council members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, rallied behind Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit and exhorted the CA fraternity to vote her back to power.

In their audit of the Delhi government's five-year balance sheet, former president of the institute ND Gupta, who is also a council member of the ICAI, and Sunil Gulati, another council member, gave Dikshit a clean chit.

"In our view, she has presented a true and fair government after taking into account all the available information," said Gulati addressing a gathering comprising largely aspiring CAs at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry auditorium.

Reading out statistics, Gulati said there were 18,000 CAs in Delhi and another 53,000 students who were pursuing the course. He went a step further and asked all of them to vote Dikshit for another term.

Council members were, however, divided on the ethical issue of sitting council members or past presidents openly lobbying for a particular political party. When contacted, a government nominee in the Council said, "If members use their position in the ICAI, it is ethically wrong." Though CAs in the podium were addressed as council members or past presidents of the ICAI, the meeting itself was not under the aegis of the institute.

Dikshit took time off her busy campaign schedule to address the intelligentsia. For her, it was business as usual, as she stood up and asked the CAs to cast their vote in her party's favour. "Often, the well-educated sit back and abstain from voting, thinking what their single vote can do. But, every vote makes a difference," she said.

She carefully chose issues like increasing population density of Delhi and putting the Capital city into the global map. Delhi will be the only city in the world to have a human development report," Dikshit said.

The Delhi government has tied up with the United Nations to prepare the first city report on human development, she added.

While extolling Congress' clean and IT-savvy administration in Delhi, Gulati said he and several other CAs would employ all means, short messaging service and e-mails, to ask corporates, their principal clients and all other contacts, to support Dikshit in all possible manner.

"We only talk about corporate governance, but we have seen good governance in the state, under you," he added.