Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit has on Monday unveiled a slew of announcements in the first session of the current and 16th Legislative Assembly. The assembly session was held at Kalaivanar Arangam in Chennai, nearly six weeks after the current government was formed. The first session of a new assembly will always have a customary speech of the Governor highlighting the governance and policies of the new government. 

Purohit had announced the policies and measures of MK Stalin-led reign and one of the significant announcements of Governor is unveiling the new Economic Advisory Council of the state government. In what has become an iconic advisory council, the panel consists of legendary economists who hold a massive reputation on the global and national stage. 

Economic Advisory Council constitutes of five members - former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, former Chief Economic Adviser to the Union government Arvind Subramanian, Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo, former Union Finance Secretary S Narayan, and Development economist Jean Dreze. These figures are at the scale that they don't introduction and their induction to the council has become one of the crucial developments in Stalin's government. 

The iconic council would be advising the state government in its drive of economic revival and the council has come at a high time when Tamil Nadu is in a state of resuscitating its economy, which has been ailing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As pandemic still ravages the state with the expectation of the third wave, the council will play a pivotal role in lifting the economy and fixing the shattered corridors. 

During his customary speech, Governor Purohit said, "The government will revitalize the state's economy and ensure that benefits of economic growth reach all segments of society, based on the recommendation of the council." By highlighting the DMK government's policy, Purohit said that the Tamil Nadu government is fully committed to achieving greater autonomy for the states. It must be noted that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has set a precedent by bringing the big economic minds to the same table. 

A brief about the members of MK Stalin's Economic Advisory Council: 

Raghuram Rajan is a prominent economist who served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Union government in 2012. He had then served as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, becoming one of the notable heads of India's central bank. Rajan is a critic of the economic policies of Modi's regime including demonetization and GST. Currently, Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. 

Arvind Subramanian is a successor of Raghuram Rajan as Chief Economic Adviser. Subramanian, who is an alumnus of the University of Oxford and IIM Ahmedabad, served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Union government from October 2014 to June 2018. Currently, he is a visiting lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year along with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, is a professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Jean Dreze is a professor at the Delhi School of Economics and at the Department of Economics at Ranchi University. Another member of the council is S Narayan, an IAS officer of the 1965 batch, who served as the Union Finance Secretary and as Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister in 2003-04.