Punjab has among the highest tractor densities in India and by a wide margin more tractors than its farm sizes can economically justify. A holding of two hectares does not need its own tractor and a great many two-hectare holdings have one.
The reasons are status, credit availability, and the fact that a tractor is the most visible thing a farming family can own. Tractor loans are a documented component of rural indebtedness.
It also did real work: it replaced bullocks entirely within about twenty years, which ended the haveli, the fodder economy for draught animals, the bullock cart, the Persian wheel and the village blacksmith's main trade.
Custom hiring and cooperative machinery banks have been promoted for decades as the alternative and have not displaced individual ownership.
In 2020 and 2021 the tractor and trolley became the vehicle of a political movement, driving from Punjab villages to the borders of Delhi and staying there for a year. Nobody who saw the trolleys converted into insulated shelters will read the ownership figures the same way again.
Punjab has the highest tractor density in India and a large share of the machines are far larger than the holdings they work, which is a statement about status as much as about farming.
The purchase is financed and the tractor is the standard object of rural credit. A great deal of Punjab's farm debt is machinery debt rather than crop debt.
It also became a political instrument. The tractor march is the standard form of Punjabi agrarian protest and the 2020 and 2021 protests moved on them by the thousand.