Manmohan Singh is an Indian economist and politician who served as the Prime Minister of India from 2004 to 2014. The first Sikh in office, Singh was also the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term. Born in Gah (now in Punjab, Pakistan), Singh's family migrated to India during its partition in 1947. After obtaining his doctorate in economics from Oxford, Singh worked for the United Nations during 1966–69. He subsequently began his bureaucratic career when Lalit Narayan Mishra hired him as an advisor in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Over the 70s and 80s, Singh held several key posts in the Government of India, such as Chief Economic Advisor (1972–76), Reserve Bank governor (1982–85) and Planning Commission head (1985–87).

Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist and an international academic who is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2013 and September 2016. Between 2003 and 2006, Rajan was the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund. In 2015, during his tenure at the Indian Reserve Bank he also became Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements. At the Federal Reserve annual Jackson Hole conference in 2005, Rajan warned about the growing risks in the financial system and proposed policies that would reduce such risks.

Amartya Kumar Sen, CH, FBA is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and member of faculty at Harvard Law School. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and India's Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. In 2017, Sen was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for most valuable contribution to Political Science.

Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati is an Indian-born naturalized American economist. He is a University Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University. Bhagwati is notable for his research in international trade and for his advocacy of free trade. Bhagwati was born in 1934, into a Gujarati family in the Bombay Presidency during the British Raj, and received a BA from Sydenham College, Mumbai. He then traveled to England to study at St. John's College, Cambridge, receiving a second BA at Cambridge (in Economics) in 1956. Between 1957 and 1959 he studied at Nuffield College, Oxford. He received the Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 for a thesis titled "Essays in International Economics", supervised by Charles P. Kindleberger.