There is a general sense that the legal system in India is inefficient. First, there is over-legislation and unnecessary State intervention, both in the form of statutes and administrative law (rules, regulations, procedures). This increases non-transparency and contributes to rent-seeking, which is not distributionally neutral, because the relatively poor tend to suffer more. Second, over-legislation exists simultaneously with under-governance, because laws aren't enforced and the dispute resolution system, including enforcement of contracts, isn't credible.

Reforming legal institutions is not only a desirable end in itself, it also has the byproduct of adding to GDP growth. While these points are unassailable, most empirical work on documenting inefficiencies of the Indian legal system is fraught with problems. For a start, cross-country comparisons tend to be overly simplistic, ignoring the specifics of the legal regime and the context within which the country is situated. In addition, legal indicators used, even when they are not cross-country, tend to be too macro and aggregate and are indiscriminately used. For instance, data collected for Hyderabad are applied to all of Andhra Pradesh. This paper adopts a different approach. It draws contrasts between Gurgaon and Faridabad, districts (and towns) not only located within the same State, but also districts with similar historical and geographical backgrounds. This enables one to control for many variables that cause different trajectories of legal and economic development within and across countries. The paper then seeks to explain the differential growth in these two geographical regions through differences in the legal land regimes.

Private sector participation and private investment have become the mainstay of the Government of India's policy toward infrastructural development. The success of the ongoing eleventh five-year plan critically depends on the success of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure. Moreover, several state governments are also trying to attract PPPs for the provision of public goods.

In this paper, we have studied the performance of the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) programme of Government of India, for development of highways and expressways. The focus of the study is on the following questions: Why have some projects attracted private investment while others have not? Why only a few states have attracted PPPs, while some others have completely failed to do so? We have also discussed some other issues related to the PPP policy and its limited success. We have provided a set of legal and economic variables that explain the skewed distribution of PPPs across projects as well as across the states. We have shown that the richer states have attracted more PPPs than the poorer ones. Besides, the probability of PPP is higher for projects located on national highways connecting richer states, and those located closer to mega cities. Moreover, ceteris paribus, the quality of governance, in terms of the level of property rights protection, in a state is also a significant explanatory variable. Empirical evidence in support of these claims is conclusive and robust. In the light of our findings, we have answered the following additional questions: Is PPP a viable and desirable public policy for development of infrastructure in poor states? What are the lessons emerging from the Indian experience with PPPs so far? Our dataset includes all of the highway and expressway projects that have been or are being developed as a part of the National Highways Development Project (NHDP).