Tractor Days: Loans, Lives and Lessons

Tractor Days is a vivid journey into rural India, where the sun rises over fields of mustard and sugarcane, and the thrum of a tractor engine is as familiar as the morning rooster, lies a world rarely captured in literature; the world of rural finance. Tractor Days is a humble attempt to step into that soil. It is not about balance sheets or banking jargon. It is about people. Borrowers. Bankers. Dealers. Dreamers. And tractors-not just as machines, but as metaphors for hope, ambition, and sometimes, heartbreak.The stories in this book unfold in a fictional Banwadi, but they echo truths from villages across Indias vast agrarian belt. They come alive in conversations under Banyan trees, in the faded pages of passbooks, in laughter, in silences, and in the uneasy pause before signing a loan document. At the centre of it all is Raghav an Agri Field Officer of one of the commercial Bank, who traverses nearby villages of Banwadi Branch with his bag of forms and his bundle of beliefs. Through his eyes, we meet mechanics with dreams, widows with grit, dealers with schemes, and borrowers with reasons; some noble, some not.This book is for lenders who still visits fields, the farmers who still believes in credit, the policymakers who wants to understand ground truth, and the readers who simply wants to know what happens when finance meets faith on a dusty rural road. The learnings and lessons have lot to draw parallel and understand from different types of tractor borrower