One of the biggest droughts to hit Maharashtra was in 1972. In Pimpalgaon (Dhas), a village in Barshi taluka, Vishnu Dhas’s family of farm labourers managed to survive for a decade after the catastrophic event.

When the drought returned in the 1980s, it drove his parents out of their village to Pune . Born in a slum in Ghorpadi, Dhas has now built a business around a question that has always stayed with him — “How could an agricultural family make a living without leaving home?”

Even as Maharashtra confronts another drought, Dhas inaugurated a business venture on October 25. TractorNext aims to solve the problem of farmers often buying equipment, such as a tractor, bulldozer or agricultural drone, based on marketing hardsell or because somebody else in the village owns one of these machines.

Dhas says that the machines are expensive, with the average price of a drone being Rs 10 lakh. Buying the wrong, high-priced technology can be a costly mistake.…