The Hindu Business Line : Infrastructure, the backbone

Inclusive growth is possible only if we focus on infrastructure, write Amir Ullah Khan and Harsh Vivek in States of the Indian Economy (www.sagepublications.com). “Infrastructure forms the backbone of any economy. Roads, railway networks, telecommunication facilities, airports, power supply, drinking water facilities, Internet facilities, banking and financial services, and so on, are all the necessary ingredients that go into the making of any successful growth story,” they explain.

The world is waiting with bated breath for the Indian elephant to come out of its slumber and start jogging, the authors urge.

“The window of opportunity that now beckons India is available only for a limited period. How much and how fast we are able to realise the potential of the economy largely depends on the policy environment we choose to adopt and the investment decisions we choose to make today.”

Recommended read for a macro view.
Law against illiteracy

Laws are not a set of inscrutable rules distanced from us, requiring mediation by expert practitioners, say Kamala Sankaran and Ujjwal Kumar Singh in Towards Legal Literacy ( www.oup.com ). “Laws are inextricably associated with our lives,” they state.

The book, designed as an introduction to law in India, capitalises on the ‘growing consciousness about rights and the need… to be aware of its empowering potential’. Law is ‘public’, yet ‘it also constitutes some enduring forms of obscene ordering of regimes of public secret,’ rues Upendra Baxi in his opening essay.

“The state law and languages, in the main, create and sustain myriad orders of legal illiteracy amidst a vast subject populace. To know one’s obligations and rights, one has to have access to the ‘free’ market for legal services which already out-prices a large majority of people. Legal literacy then may be simply thought of as a continual war against forms of power and domination that thrive by the production of legal illiteracy.”

Good for the professionals’ shelf!
Primer on international finance

An Indian multinational corporation has subsidiaries in Mexico and the UK. These subsidiaries purchase from and sell to each other, in dollars.
“The Mexican subsidiary has to make a payment of $5 million to the British subsidiary on December 1, and is due to receive $3 million from the British subsidiary on December 25. Show how leading and lagging to December 15 can reduce the amount to be hedged.”

Thus reads one of the many illustrations in International Finance by G. Shailaja ( www.universitiespress.com ). The book, structured to meet the curricular requirements of a postgraduate course, has informative chapters on topics such as balance of payments, capital budgeting for overseas investment, export financing, currency derivatives, transfer pricing and so on.

Starter material of value.

D. Murali
http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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