Nitish Kumar, irking his allies, has supported PM Modi's ban on high value notes to curb black money.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu will head a committee of Chief Ministers that will suggest ways to move to a cashless economy and to ease the situation caused by the massive cash crunch after the government banned 500- and 1,000-rupee notes to combat black or untaxed money.
Among those invited on the panel by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who has stood out among opposition leaders for his support to the Centre's demonetisation move. Mr Kumar is expected to RSVP later today.
The government's move is seen as an effort to take the sting out of the fierce attack by opposition parties against the notes ban. It has also invited on the panel Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar of the Left, one of the harshest critics of the currency ban and Congress Chief Minister V Narayanaswamy of Puducherry.
The others reportedly tapped for the committee are Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, whose party the BJD give issue based support to the government and has not participated in the notes ban protests of the opposition and the BJP's Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh.
Arun Jaitley called Chandrababu Naidu on the phone on Monday afternoon to ask him to head the panel, news agency Press Trust of India said. Chandrababu Naidu, an ally of the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance or NDA, has been seeking a ban on high value notes as a way to curb corruption.
He has welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision on November 8 to scrap 500- and 1000-rupee notes, but objected to a 2,000-rupee note being introduced.
PM Modi has aggressively pitched for a cashless economy, promising that the hardship caused to people by the cash crunch that has followed his ban on high value notes will be gone in 50 days.
As people have had to line up at banks for days for rationed new notes and rural India, which has poor access to banking, has reported extreme distress, opposition parties have hit out at the government for what former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the Congress called a "monumental management failure".
They have held up parliament proceedings demanding that PM Modi explain his decision and the way it was implemented, and have protested both in parliament and out of the streets.