Punjab Tractors Ltd.

Mahindra & Mahindra Swaraj Division

For progress and prosperity
Industry	Agricultural & Farm Equipment Manufacturers
Successor	Mahindra & Mahindra
Founded	Mohali, Punjab (India), 1972
Products	Agricultural Tractors Combine Harvesters Forklift Trucks
Number of employees	2100

Swaraj division is a tractor and farm equipment making company which is owned by Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. Formerly known as Punjab Tractors Limited, the company was taken over by Mahindra Group in 2007 and subsequently in 2009, the name was changed to Swaraj Division.Punjab Tractors was the first Indian company to indigenously manufacture agricultural tractors in India, aptly named as Swaraj - giving a new dimension to the concept of self-reliance put forth by MK Gandhi. The seeds of this organization were sown in Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CMERI), Durgapur (West Bengal) in 1960s in the form of a design project, which later took the form of an organization in Mohali (Punjab), near Chandigarh.

It was in 1964 that the then Prime Minister of India, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru invited Man Mohan Suri to join as Director of CMERI. In April 1965, on Suri’s invitation, Chandra Mohan quit Indian Railways and joined CMERI. In August 1965, Man Mohan Suri accompanied Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s delegation to Moscow as a technical expert and returned with the idea of manufacturing 20HP tractors for small farmers at a rate of around 12000 tractors per annum. In September 1965, a five-page proposal was submitted to Union Planning Commission (Subsequently changed to Niti Aayog) and the project was assigned.

The basic R&D began at CMERI in 1965. The core design team was around six young engineers, mostly fresh engineering graduates with limited knowledge of materials and processing. No one except Mr. Chandra Mohan was familiar with agricultural tractors.

In order to gain some insight, two tractors were bought for detailed study. Technical Inputs regarding product design were obtained from various sources, viz. Indian Patent Office, Kolkata and IIT Kharagpur (The only institute running PG course in Agricultural Engineering at that time).