Every year, we celebrate record tractor sales like it's a medal count. Ads show proud farmers revving brand-new machines — but when exactly are all these tractors working? Because if they really ran every day, we’d have tilled the Himalayas by now many times over.
India sells enough tractors annually to plough more land than we actually farm. Which means: either they sit idle for 364 days, or they’re being used for things they were never built for like ferrying wedding guests or pulling construction rubble. Bought on bank loans, backed by government subsidies, these machines often become debt magnets, not productivity tools.
And yet, we keep selling more. Why? Because somewhere along the way, a tractor became less a farm tool and more a symbol of arrival, not utility. A shiny illusion of rural prosperity that doesn’t always start or steer.
When we measure rural progress by parked machines instead of working farms, we’re not mechanizing agriculture; we’re just romanticizing it.
