Those who burn the midnight oil

• Yashwant Sinha,
  is in his second stint as finance minister. He held the same portfolio in the short-lived Chandra Shekhar government. Despite the calls for swadeshi, Sinha is known to be pro-liberalisation. This time, what with economic sanctions, a recession-like situation, a yawning fiscal deficit, and calls for more expenditure to revive the economy, Sinha faces a truly difficult path. He will need all the skills that he acquired as a senior bureaucrat in Bihar to meet the contradictory pulls.

• Montek Singh Ahluwalia,
  the secretary, department of economic affairs. Little patience with the shoves and pulls of politics: Ahluwalia, like Finance Minister P Chidambaram, represents the continuity motif; but at the bureaucratic level. When Dr Manmohan Singh held the reins in the finance ministry, Ahluwalia was his most trusted lieutenant and has tended to share credit with Singh as one of the chief architects of the economic reforms programme.

• Nand Kishore Singh,
  the revenue secretary in the ministry of finance. Easily accessible and perhaps too open: Flamboyant and one of the most easily accessed bureaucrats in the government, Singh had to face a whiff of trouble last year over when he served as expenditure secretary over the government's expenditure policy announcement.

• Dr Shankar Acharya,
  the chief economic advisor to the government. The priority setter: Extremely publicity-shy and with a cultivated image of being one of the backroom boys, Acharya -- who, like Ahluwalia, was educated at Oxford -- has been determining sectoral priorities for the past four years.