It started with a question nobody in the room could answer. A group of friends from Bengaluru, the kind who can debate filter coffee brewing techniques for an hour, had driven out to visit a farm. The family that hosted them grew crops the old way, on land that had been in their name for generations. At some point, one of them asked something almost embarrassingly simple: farm electricity in India is free, so why does every tractor in the country still run on diesel?
Nobody had a good answer. One of the visitors, an automotive engineer named Anoop Srikantaswamy, couldn't stop thinking about it on the drive back.
