Ramachandra Guha is a historian and columnist living in Bangalore. He has taught at the universities of Yale, Stanford, and Oslo, and at the Indian Institute of Science. In 1997 and 1998 he was the Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the Univesity of California at Berkeley. His books include Savaging the Civilized (University of Chicago Press, 1999) Environmentalism: A Global History (Addison Wesley Longman, 2000); A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002); and India after Gandhi (Macmillan, 2007).

Nandan Nilekani is co-Chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited, which he helped found in 1981. He is also a co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). Mr Nilekani's awards include the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay's 'Distinguished Alumnus Award' (1999) and Fortune magazine's 'Asia's Businessmen of the Year 2003' award. He was named among 'World's Most Respected Business Leaders in 2002' in a survey conducted by the Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is the author of Imagining India, published by Penguin in 2008.

Ramachandra Guha serves as the Managing Trustee of the New India Foundation.

The Trustees are assisted by a ‘Board of Advisers’ whose members are Professor André Béteille, Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal, Dr Vijay Kelkar, and N. Ravi.

André Béteille is widely regarded as India's most distinguished sociologist and social anthropologist. A former Chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, from 1972 to 1999 he was Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. He has been Commonwealth Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, and Tinbergen Professor at Erasmus University. His many books include Caste, Class and Power (University of California Press, 1965); Inequality among Men (Blackwell, 1977); and Equality and Universality (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Niraja Gopal Jayal is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. An Inlaks scholar, her books include Democracy and the State (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Representing India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). She is also one of the two editors of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Indian Politics. She has been a consultant to the Government of India, the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank. In 2009 she will deliver the prestigious Radhakrishnan lectures at Oxford University.

Vijay Kelkar currently serves as the Chairman of the Finance Commission, with the rank of a Cabinet Minister in the Government of India. After taking his Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, Dr Kelkar went into public service. The positions he has held include Secretary, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister; Finance Secretary, Government of India; and Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund. Dr Kelkar has published widely on trade policy and on economic reforms, and has lectured at a number of universities, including Cornell, Harvard, and Heidelberg.

N. Ravi has been Editor of The Hindu since 1991. His previous assignments in the newspaper included leader writer, Washington correspondent, and associate editor. Mr Ravi's awards include the G. K. Reddy Memorial Award for excellence in journalism (1993) and the BREAD Role Model Award (2000). He has been Chairman of the Press Trust of India and now serves as a Director on its Board. In 2000 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School.