Nitin reacts to an article in the Financial Times:

Anyone who describes India’s jettisoning of the licence raj in 1991 using words like “neo-liberal” is necessarily confused. And anyone who writes about Indian agriculture quoting P Sainath and no one else is necessarily unbalanced. [..] Following a ‘neoliberal agenda’ the Indian government “scaled back provision of water, seed and credit, driving farmers to gamble on export crops like genetically modified cotton”. That puts an ideology (neo-liberalism, of course) to the government’s sheer incompetence and neglect of investing in the provision of basic public services. But it does not prove that water, seed and credit would have reached farmers had there been no reforms.