With the April 1 deadline nearing, India has expedited efforts to converge its accounting standards with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), as part of its G-20 commitment made in September, 2009.

Nearly 300 companies slotted for convergence in the first phase were scheduled to give their feedback to the corporate affairs ministry by Monday on a roadmap. These are companies with public offerings listed in stock exchanges in India and abroad and companies, whether listed or not, having a net worth more than Rs 1,000 crore. The corporate affairs ministry is taking suggestions on issues of convergence process.

India, a G-20 member, is vying to achieve a single set of high quality, global accounting standards by ironing out the divergences the Indian accounting standards have with the IFRS. India, as a conscious policy decision has decided to go for ‘convergence’ rather than ‘adoption’ to suit the local economic environment and safeguard the interests of the domestic companies.

It is believed that the convergence with the IFRS would bring in more reliability and comparative financial information for investors globally and will also cut down costs for the Indian companies as the need for restatement of accounts would be done away with. However, despite convergence of Indian standards with IFRS, experts accept that some deviations will not go. In such an event, where the converged accounting standards in India are not totally consistent with the IFRS as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), Indian companies will continue to follow converged accounting standards as (to be) notified by the government of India and not adopt IFRS.

These standards have been finalised by the National Advisory Committee on Accounting Standards (NACAS) after considering the stakeholders’ concerns. Earlier, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) had invited public comments on it and examined the standards.