Akshay Jaitly is a founding partner of the law firm Trilegal and a leading energy and infrastructure lawyer with over 30 years of experience. He also contributes to policy work on energy transition, power sector reform, and improving commercial relationships between the government and the private sector through public writing and the non-profit TrustBridge.

Professor Rajeeva L Karandikar is currently Chairperson of the National Statistics commission and Professor Emeritus at Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI).

Rajeeva obtained his Ph. D. at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), 1981 and was a Professor at ISI and Director at CMI, and for 4 years, he was Executive Vice President at Cranes Software International Limited, Bangalore.

Rajeeva has made significant contributions to various areas including Stochastic Calculus, Filtering theory, Markov processes and martingale problems, limit theorems, Monte Carlo techniques, queuing theory, game theory, theory of option pricing. He has authored three books, two Professor G Kallianpur and one with Professoe B V Rao. He is a fellow of Indian National Science Academy and Indian Academy of sciences, was awarded the young scientist medal by Indian National Science Academy (1985), S S Bhatnagar prize by Council of Industrial and scientific research (1999), C R Rao National award in statistics by Government of India (2000) and P C Mahalanobis Memorial Medal awarded by Indian National Science Congress.

Dr Karandikar has been involved in numerous consultancy projects over the years. He has worked on development of proprietary Blockcipher algorithms for Indian defense services. Dr Karandikar has been involved with opinion polls and exit polls in India since 1998. He has worked with India Today, Doordarshan, T V Today (Aaj Tak) during 1998-2005, CNN-IBN during 2005-2014, ABP News (2015-2019). 

Philipp Krause specializes in public finance and public administration. He is a co-founder of the Global Public Finance Lab and board secretary of the African Economic Research Consortium. He has held management positions at CABRI (Africa’s network of senior budget officials), the Gates Foundation, and ODI. He has also worked for the German and Mexican governments, and the World Bank.

He holds an MA from the University of Potsdam and a PhD from the LSE. Philipp covered everything from macro-fiscal policy to procurement and performance budgeting but remains most interested in ministries of finance.