New Delhi, Jan. 28: A search committee set up to find a successor to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, M. Damodaran, is likely to meet this week.

This meeting comes at a time when Damodaran, who is again in the running for the post, will be busy at a conclave of regulators from other Southeast Asian countries. Headed by cabinet secretary K. Chandrashekhar, the search committee has finance secretary Subba Rao and financial markets secretary A. Ramanathan as its members.

Rao and Ramanathan are junior to Damodaran in the IAS. Bureaucrats are very conscious about seniority and, normally, a civil servant is not interviewed for a job by juniors.

On the sidelines of the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Sebi’s counterpart in Pakistan, Damodaran told journalists that he was not a “job seeker”. He then quoted Q. Humphry: “I have never refused any job that I have not been offered.”

According to officials in the finance ministry, others in the race include U.K. Sinha, former joint secretary of the finance ministry’s capital markets division and now the head of UTI Asset Management Company; C.B. Bhave, who heads National Securities Depository Limited; M.B.N. Rao, chairman and managing director of Canara Bank; and petroleum secretary M.S. Srinivasan.

Damodaran had recently taken steps to check inflow of foreign funds through participatory notes, which analysts consider as non-transparent.

Damodaran said he had not been losing sleep over market fluctuations. “I have been sleeping eight hours a day. You see my forehead and do you see any lines of worries added?”

To facilitate co-operation and exchange of information, Sebi today signed a bilateral MoU with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan. Damodaran and head of the Pakistan Securities and Exchange Commission Raiz-ur-Rehman signed the pact.