The new members of the 12-member council headed by the Prime Minister are BJP economic cell chief Jagdish shettigar, NCAER chief Rakesh Mohan and senior economists Ashok Gulati and M Narasimham.

The members who are dropped are economists Arjun Sengupta and Ashok Desai and Disinvestment Commission chairman G V Ramakrishna.

Other members are IG Patel, PN Dhar, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Kirit Parikh, Amaresh Bagchi, Brajesh Mishra, principal secretary to the Prime minister will also be a member of the council, while NK Singh, secretary to the Prime Minister, will be the member-secretary of the council.

The reconstitution of the council indicates added emphasis to both agriculture and infrastructure. While Gulati of the Institute of Economic Growth is a reputed expert on agriculture, the presence of both Rakesh Mohan who authored the India Infrastructure Report and Deepak Parekh of the Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation suggests that infrastructure will top the PM's economic agenda.

In both cases, the PM will expect his economic advisory team to come up with innovative packages which may also be somewhat politically less risky to carry out. Gulati, for instance, has long been advocating complete freeing up of agriculture markets and has carried out empirical studies to show the advantage to be got from this. Deepak Parekh, who was a part of the task force on infrastructure the last time around also, is expected to add value to the PM's council on how to proceed with innovative strategies for the infrastructure sector.

Shettigar is one of the more moderate RSS economic ideologues, but he definitely belongs to the internal-reforms-before-external-ones school. It is not clear whether his presence in the council means any change in the direction that reforms will continue in, or whether this is an attempt by the PM to co-opt more people.

The task force on infrastructure, set up last year to operationalise the execution of national highways development project, development of five airports to world standard and prepare an integrated transport policy, would continue to be headed by the Planning Commission deputy chairman K C Pant.

Surface Transport minister Nitish Kumar, minister for civil aviation Sharad Yadav, IDFC chairman Deepak Parekh, Anand Mahindra and the secretaries of the ministeries of surface transport, civil aviation and the department of expenditure would be other members of the task force, according to a PMO release.

Chief economic advisor Shankar Acharya will also be a member, N K Singh will be member-secretary and industrialist Ratan Tata will be permanent invitee to the meetings of the task force.