The North Block corridors are not constructed to radiate humour and telling of anecdotes. The mandarins of finance and their next door neighbour, the home ministry, share a common trait in their line of work?they are perpetually putting out fires. Humour is, thus, scarce.

Standing in the middle of one particularly incendiary spell in 2002, a joint secretary in the capital markets division could still create loud guffaws among journalists and officers alike with his laconic wit.

It was late 2002 and the original UTI was disintegrating, and with it dreams of a couple of million Indian middle class investors; one finance minister (Yashwant Sinha) had lost his job over it and the next, Jaswant Singh, naturally treated this as his top priority. Upendra Kumar Sinha, the JS, was surrounded by mediapersons as he announced that the government would float bonds to make the collapse easier for everybody. As everyone strained to catch every syllable, a bright colleague remembering names like resurgent bonds and millennium bonds asked Sinha what would be the names of the bonds. Sinha said, ?UTI 1, then UTI 2 and so on. Don’t expect any fancy names from the government now.?

The quip melted the tension and we think the build-up of animosity too over the perceived government failure to forestall UTI’s collapse. In the next few days, all the newspapers and business channels (few at that time) reported the bond scheme, but factually and generally supported the government line to raise more money for a company, even though it had got into trouble because the government was sleeping on the job.

This is the signature trait of Sinha; the ability to underplay the oh-my-god-what’s-happening phenomena too common to the Indian financial sector.

Possibly that’s also the reason why the financial sector was visibly pleased when he was appointed as the eighth chief of Securities and Exchange Board of India in February of this year.

To say Sinha has his hands full is an under-statement. Sinha has come in at a time when relations between the finance ministry and almost all financial sector regulators, and especially Sebi, are pretty dismal.

While the ‘ad’ was for a five-year term, the appointments committee of the cabinet issued an order for a three-year term to Sinha. But the new chief smothered the fire, saying the ad talked of a maximum five years at the helm. ?I have been given a three-year term?.

In Budget 2002, the government announced it wanted to make Mumbai a global financial centre. Even as the plan kicked up a storm, several of our ilk went to Sinha as he was going to be one of the key persons in the architecture. As one of us gushed about the changes required, Sinha kept working off the files on his table, only to look up and ask ?how old are you?? Cut midway, I must have looked confused, till he said ?come back after ten years, we will look at this?. That was a prescient remark.

This is something that has set him apart, the ability to separate those that need to be pursued right now and those which can wait.

Of the ones he is pursuing right now, possibly the most difficult is to make the financial sector regulators and the finance ministry smoke the peace pipe. Disputes between the ministry and the regulators are not unusual, as several countries have had similar bouts. But the intensity of the differences between the finance ministry and the regulators and among the regulators that have sprung up reaching flashpoint in the last couple of years is something the Indian financial sector has not wrestled with before.

Sinha has come in long after the Sebi and the Irda fought a bruising war in 2010 over who will control the ULIPs. But the debris left by it has rankled, especially as it also led to the unusual situation where, breaking carefully erected firewalls, the finance minister has assumed the role of chairperson to resolve inter-regulatory differences.

The Sebi chief has made a good beginning though. For the first time, taking a cue from the post-Budget meeting between the finance minister and the RBI board, Sinha organised a similar one with the Sebi board.

The ULIP spat of 2010 was rather unfortunate, as it also impacted the market for mutual funds. The funds already had worries to settle from the meltdown of 2008. In an effort to make the mutual fund space more transparent and reduce their dependence on corporate deposits, his predecessor CB Bhave had introduced a series of changes that did not go down well with them. The most drastic among these is the rule that mutual funds cannot pay their distributors for the scheme they sell. It did not help that all the changes were made in a period when the market itself was not looking attractive for retail investors. Though the changes levelled the field between small and large distributors, the strong dose of adjustments imposed on the mutual fund companies in a short spell has made Sinha?s task difficult.

If that was a difficult cocktail, there are other storm clouds too. As modern markets have begun to trade at the speed of light, it means fewer arbitrage opportunities for brokerages too, who are, therefore, either shutting shop or cutting down shop floor assistants.

This raises the spectre of increased concentration among fewer companies and even less space for retail investors.

In any case, Sinha would have had his task cut out, as few market regulators in India have left office without controversy. The tribe of disgruntled fund houses and brokerages just adds heat to the already warm waters.

It is here that UK, as he is known ubiquitously, has a tremendous advantage. He has served two long spells in the finance ministry as joint secretary banking and in the capital markets division. The banking one was at the blowout phase of the stock market crisis of 2001 and the latter was spent picking up the debris from the UTI crash. Just as Sinha was marshalling arguments against and calls from the joint parliamentary committee and others to ‘discipline’ the markets, the new UPA government faced a huge selloff on their very first day in office on May 17, 2004. Sinha played a key role in a finance ministry-led committee that investigated that crash to figure out if there indeed was a concerted selling action in the Indian domestic market. The committee clearly dispelled a recurring myth in the Indian stock market?hot money dominates Indian stock markets and most of it is sourced from notoriously fickle FIIs.

It says something about the man that three finance ministers found faith in him. Two of them, Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh, were from the BJP, while P Chidambaram was from the Congress.

It was under Chidambaram that UK Sinha fought a long battle to make Parliament approve pension reforms. But he was candid in acknowledging his mistake of strategy. When the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Bill was drafted in 2002, it had not attracted attention at all. But at that time, he was too busy with the UTI bush fire to get the Bill cleared through Parliament. ?It was a great window we missed,? he would say. By 2004, when the first lot of new government employees were slotted into the new pension scheme, the battlelines were already drawn. The Bill has still not been passed. Sinha said he learnt a valuable lesson of not delaying a reform measure for want of a better window of opportunity.

This is the reason why the new chief has frontloaded his agenda at the Sebi. The takeover code, the reforms in the mutual fund industry, et al, are already being scribbled out and Sinha is adding more every month.