The dhangars, traditional nomads who spend eight months every year on the move in search of grazing pastures for their sheep, are now selling their sheep to buy tractors. They have been seeing an excellent economic opportunity in hiring out their tractors to level and plough land in far-off Vidarbha and Marathwada on one side and the plains of Konkan on the other. And the idea seems to have clicked.

The classic example is Mirde village in Phaltan, where the lives of about 1,300 shepherds living in about four settlements or wastis have changed for the better.

The tractor revolution has brought in a clutch of tractor companies—Mahindra, John Deere, Swaraj Mazda, New Holland Ford, Escort—who have started their distribution units in Phaltan. They all cater to Mirde and the nearby villages of Barad and Jawali. But it is Mirde and its enterprising shepherds who are leading this rush of new generation customers for these tractor companies.

For several generations, the dhangars of Mirde have followed an eight-month-long migration pattern every year, during which they would cover not less than around 300 km on foot. Everyone moves—women, children and livestock. They would stay in their village only for the remaining four months, hardly enough to cultivate their land. The only time they saw a tractor was when some rich farmer from outside the village would drive up to buy sheep manure.

The change began a few years ago when one of them, Virsingh Kashaba Yadav, was bold enough to sell off his sheep and approach a nationalised bank to seek a loan to buy a tractor. It was a bold move. Soon, others followed.

Today in Mirde, there are close to 400 tractors as against about 10-15 tractors in any Maharashtra village. The shepherds still migrate for seven-eight months a year; not on foot, but on these tractors. Only the men travel now; the women stay back and ensure the children go to school. The men cover long distances on their tractors, looking for farmers who need a tractor to level or plough their fields but can’t afford one.

“Over the last five years, I have managed to buy three tractors from the money I made from lending my tractors. The first time, I raised the money by selling my sheep. There were over 5,000 sheep in our wasti before all this began; now there are only about 1,000 left. For the first time, our children have begun to go to school,” says Bhimsen Kachre, a man in his early 30s. He has joined hands with others in the village to build their own primary school.

But he’s reluctant to spell out the kind of money he makes. “The government has never helped us. We had to do it all on our own. We never got any grants unlike other tribes. Now we don’t need trouble just because we make a decent living,” he says.

In Kachrewada, one of the four major settlements of Mirde, the sheep pens have given way to parking space for one, sometimes even two, tractors. The affluence spills over to TVs and other such acquisitions.

The maximum growth in this sheep-for-tractor swap has come about in the last three years. But this may not last for long. The dhangars, who earned about Rs 1.5-2 lakh a year after repaying their loans and attending to their expenditure, are already beginning to feel the pinch.

“The indications so far this year are that the sales will come down a notch due to a combination of factors—there are too many tractors in this area,” says Shirish Doshi, partner at a Mahindra sales outlet in Phaltan.