India needs economists to usher in reforms

We have a government with an extremely weak economic team advising a PM who hardly pays attention to their thoughts, writes Jayanta Roy

I had the privilege of working under six prime ministers during my seven years as economic adviser to the Government of India (GoI). I started off in the then Planning Commission under Morarji Desai (1977-1979). We had a fantastic team of economists in Vijay Kelkar, Nitin Desai, T L Sankar,  Lovraj Kumar, Yoginder Alagh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who had just joined then, DC Rao, Shankar Acharya and many others. Our guiding guru was the late Sukhamoy Chakravarty. We all worked as a team and took the right economic steps with full support of the prime minister (PM). 

I then went back