Indians' Road to Success

Indians' Road to Success
By CRAIG KARMIN and JACKIE RANGE
Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2007
Hopefuls Go to Far-Flung Test Sites Due to Chartered Analysts' Dispute

Vikash Kumar, a business student in India, took a trip to Nepal last week with four friends. To get there and back, they traveled for hours by airplane, taxi and rickshaw. They passed through border areas menaced by bandits.

They aren't adventure-seekers, or even tourists. Mr. Kumar and his friends are simply trying to take the Chartered Financial Analyst exam.

Passing the CFA -- a series of three grueling, six-hour tests covering economics, accounting and markets -- opens the door to high-paying financial jobs. India's booming economy is triggering a concurrent boom in CFAs: This year, India had been expected to produce more than 10,000 candidates, according to the U.S.-based CFA Institute, more than anywhere except North America. Just seven years ago, India produced less than 250.

But a long-simmering trademark spat over who has the right to use the letters "CFA" in India has thrown this year's process into disarray.

So, CFA hopefuls like Mr. Kumar are traveling the globe for alternative sites. Test-takers have ended up as far away as Sri Lanka, Oman and Nebraska.

That is, if they can get a flight. The exodus is so great that flights to Nepal in early June (an exam date there) were booked up, even though it was monsoon season, one of the worst possible times to travel in South Asia. Some CFA hopefuls trying to go to Singapore at the last minute got tripped up by the three-day waiting period for a visa, missing tests there.

Internet chat rooms are packed with frustrated CFA candidates. "Let's start off the day on a positive note and start praying to GOD" that the exams will take place, wrote someone signed "Jigz" this year in a CFA community on the social-networking Web site Orkut.

That elicited a string of sarcastic responses. Usually, people pray to pass an exam, someone retorted, but "we pray in order to sit for the exam!"

Other posts seek help finding the best test sites abroad. "ok, so who is travelling to colombo/bangkok?" asks one poster. "i am for sure....cant risk katmandu with the maoist c- happening there" -- a reference to political violence stirred up by Nepal's Mao-inspired rebels.

The notion of Maoists attacking business-school types in the Himalayas might sound far-fetched. But it is a deadly serious concern. Just ask Abhishek Verma, 26 years old, who traveled to Katmandu this year for the CFA exam only to find the city shut down by the Maoist insurgency, which is protesting government corruption and opposes the Nepalese monarchy.

Because the city was shut down, Mr. Verma had trouble finding a taxi to take him from the airport to the hotel. And once he did, he was promptly stopped by a Maoist who threatened to set the car on fire.

The taxi driver, he says, pleaded that his passengers were foreigners, not Nepalese, and was finally allowed to proceed unharmed.

"We were so afraid," Mr. Verma recalls.

The dispute over India's CFA exams boils down to this: For more than a decade, the Virginia-based CFA Institute -- which administers exams world-wide -- worked with a local licensee in India. In recent years, the local licensee broke off, launched its own certification program dubbed the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India, and launched a campaign to prohibit the American firm from operating in India. The ICFAI also has opened business schools in India.

Both sides blame each other. "The fault rests with CFA alone," says S.R. Mallela, a member of the board of governors of ICFAI in Hyderabad.

The CFA says it has every legal right to operate in India, and blames the ICFAI for causing headaches for Indian students. "The burden is placed most heavily on those who don't have the means," says Jeffrey J. Diermeier, president and chief executive of the CFA Institute.

While test-takers could take the ICFA test in India, many prefer to obtain the CFA's certificate. "The ICFA doesn't even carry much weight in India," says Jasmit Singh Chandhok, a CFA candidate from New Delhi.

Which is why he flew to Bangkok a few months ago to take the CFA exam. At the test site in Thailand, he says, he was surprised to see that about a third of the 300 people in the test room there were also Indian.

"In one corner, there were four guys I knew from home," he says.

According to the CFA, Indian candidates this year have traveled to at least 16 countries to take the exam. The CFA Institute has tried to ease the financial cost by cutting a $300 check for any Indian who tested abroad. CFA registration and materials can cost more than $2,500 for all three exams needed to receive the designation, an immense sum in India, where a fairly typical urban office job might pay only $3,500 a year.

Earlier this year, Karan Mehta, a securities analyst in New Delhi, decided to take the test in Omaha, Neb., because he was going to be there anyway for a wedding. He landed a few hours before the test, bleary-eyed from the 18½-hour flight, took a quick nap, then went straight to the exam room.

Afterward, he says, he strolled around Omaha, hoping that he might bump into famed investor Warren Buffett, who lives there. "But he was too hard to find," Mr. Mehta says.

The vast majority of traveling test-takers so far have headed for Nepal, India's neighbor to the north. Nepal is close enough to India that people can get there overland, avoiding costly plane tickets and visa hassles.

Among them was Mr. Kumar, 26, the business student who went to Katmandu with his friends. While he was able to get a flight into Nepal, he wasn't able to get a round-trip ticket to fly back out.

So, after taking the test on Dec. 2, they flew to the Nepalese town of Simara, went from there to Birganj by taxi, and then by auto-rickshaw across the border. Then, it was just a seven-hour taxi ride for the five of them to Patna.

It was worth the hassle, Mr. Kumar says. "For getting into a good career, into investment banks and all, CFA's quite mandatory these days."

He had better hope the trip winds up better than it did for Nikita Sharma, 25, who traveled a similar route earlier this year. She flew to Katmandu in June to take the CFA. But traveling overland on the way back, she got stranded on her bus for 15 hours after an accident in Nepal blocked traffic.

Ms. Sharma says that she and her two friends thought about abandoning the bus and trying to hike out. But "we also got scared, if we started walking, if we would be able to save ourselves from the animals."

Instead, they stuck it out and subsisted on mango juice. At least a dozen people on the bus, including them, were also CFA candidates, she estimates.

Despite all the hassles, Ms. Sharma had no regrets -- until, that is, she learned a few weeks later that she hadn't passed the exam.

"If one had passed," Ms. Sharma says ruefully, "then one would have cherished the moment."