Sridhar Vembu set off a debate last week by asking whether we really want our farmers, teachers, doctors and priests to be “profit-driven”. Modern finance and economic theory, he argued, encourage essentially all human activity to be driven by profit, producing a “dystopian world”.
In a follow-up X post, he went further. Ask someone who chose farming why they did it, he suggested, and they would tell you they love farming, not that they wanted to make money. Farmers, he said, reluctantly abandon agriculture only when they can no longer afford to continue.
The problem is that Vembu gets capitalism, economics, and human motivation wrong, and farming most of all.
Capitalism does not require anyone to maximise profit. A free market gives you the freedom to pursue money if you want to. It gives you the same freedom to take a lower-paying job you find meaningful, donate your wealth, run a charity, start a cooperative, teach for less than you could earn elsewhere, become a monk or give something away for free.
There is nothing contradictory about a doctor caring deeply about his patients while also wanting to be well paid. A teacher may love teaching and still negotiate for a higher salary. A farmer may love his land and also want the highest possible return from it. Human beings routinely want several things at once.
Nor does economics say otherwise. Economists can quite comfortably model people as caring about leisure, family, status, charity, religion, vocation or the welfare of others. Profit maximisation is commonly used to model firms, not because economics believes every human being should worship money, but because owners generally prefer higher returns to lower ones and because competition places limits on how persistently a firm can ignore its finances.
It is a model of behaviour under particular constraints, not a moral instruction to organise your life around money.
Vembu’s own company demonstrates this. Zoho makes money, and a great deal of it. In the year to March 2025, it earned a net profit of Rs 3,191 crore on revenue of Rs 12,313 crore. It has no outside investors or public shareholders demanding returns.
Zoho itself boasts that it puts “values over money” and has “never hesitated in choosing what is right over what is instantly profitable”. Evidently, putting “values over money” has not stopped Zoho’s owners from choosing to pursue and retain substantial profits.
Vembu and Zoho’s other owners could have run the company as a cooperative, paid the surplus out as wages or priced its products at cost. No fund manager would have stopped them. They did not. The profits are kept because profits let a company invest, survive bad years, and stay independent.
Vembu once told Forbes India that “I am a capitalist and I don’t care about net worth”. That may well be true. It is also considerably easier not to care about net worth once you already have a great deal of it. Zoho continues to earn and retain substantial profits, while its owners remain free to pursue values other than money.
Farming isn’t a moral duty
Farmers deserve the same choice: the freedom to be capitalists if they want to, not a lecture from Vembu on why money should matter less to them.
Nor is it clear that farmers see farming the way Vembu imagines they do. When the government’s National Sample Survey asked farmers in 2003 about farming as a profession, 40 per cent said that, given a choice, they would take up another career. A decade later, a Lokniti-CSDS survey found something more interesting. Seventy-two per cent of farmers said they liked farming, yet 61 per cent said they would leave it for a better-paying job in a city. Sixty per cent wanted their children to settle in a city.
A farmer can love farming and still decide that another life offers him more. That is exactly the point Vembu misses.
Nor is there anything peculiar about leaving an occupation when it stops paying. The restaurateur who loves cooking closes when the customers do not cover the rent. The novelist takes a copywriting job. The musician teaches. Nobody concludes that restaurants should cease being profit-driven so that people who love running them can continue indefinitely.
Being forced out of something you love because it does not pay is unfortunate. But it is not a cruelty peculiar to markets. It is what happens when a livelihood no longer pays enough to justify the time and resources it requires, particularly when better alternatives exist.
The durable answer is to raise productivity and widen people’s alternatives, not to declare the occupation sacred.
Adam Smith understood the distinction nearly 250 years ago. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations.
His point was not that benevolence was undesirable, much less that human beings should care only about themselves. It was that society does not have to depend upon the benevolence of the people producing our dinner. Exchange allows their interest in earning a livelihood to align with our interest in getting fed.
There is no requirement that the baker regard bread-making as a sacred responsibility to civilisation.
Yet this is remarkably close to how India often talks about farming.
The farmer is annadata, the giver of food, custodian of the soil, guardian of rural civilisation. Politicians compete to proclaim their reverence for him.
There is a danger in converting someone’s occupation into a moral duty. It becomes remarkably easy to romanticise circumstances that we would never accept for ourselves.
A farmer wanting to make more money becomes materialistic. Mechanisation threatens a “way of life”. Consolidating tiny plots sounds like the destruction of rural society. Selling land becomes abandonment of one’s roots. Moving to a city for a factory or office job is often narrated as a story of displacement or desperation, when it may just as easily be a willing choice that leaves the farmer happier and better off.
Even having a low income can acquire a strange nobility. The farmer may be poor, but at least he remains close to the soil.
It is worth asking whether farmers themselves should be expected to find that consoling.
Imagine two economies producing exactly the same amount of food. In one, 100 people are required to produce it. In the other, machinery, irrigation, better seeds, capital and organisation allow 20 people to produce the same output.
The second economy has not betrayed farming. It has become more productive.
The other 80 people are now available to manufacture machinery, build houses, write software, run restaurants, treat patients or do millions of other things, provided the economy creates those opportunities. Some may decide to remain in agriculture anyway. Others will leave.
This is largely how economic development happens.
The numbers make the problem hard to miss. Agriculture and allied activities generate roughly one-fifth of national income while accounting for 46.1 per cent of the workforce. The Economic Survey 2025-26 itself identifies fragmented holdings, limited mechanisation and investment, and stagnant yields in several crops and regions as constraints on productivity and farmer incomes.
That employment-output gap is not an achievement to preserve. It means an enormous share of India’s labour is concentrated in a sector producing a much smaller share of its income.
And this is not how countries become rich.
Also read: India’s mollycoddling of agriculture is hurting manufacturing growth. It must prioritise reform
The aesthetics of poverty
One of the most consistent features of economic development is that the proportion of people working directly in agriculture falls. Productivity rises, fewer workers are required to produce food, and labour becomes available for manufacturing and services.
In 2000, roughly half of China’s workers were still employed in agriculture. Today the figure is around 22 per cent. South Korea is near 5 per cent. Japan is below 3 per cent. The United States is around 1.5 per cent. India remains above 40 per cent by the same internationally comparable World Bank series.
Rich countries did not cease to have agriculture. They raised output per agricultural worker enormously without requiring vast portions of their populations to spend their lives farming.
This is what makes the romanticisation of Indian farming so perverse. What sounds like respect for farmers can become an argument for preserving the very economic structure that keeps their incomes low.
Vembu is an especially interesting messenger because his own life demonstrates the importance of having choices.
He built Zoho into a major software business and became enormously wealthy doing so. He now chooses to live in Govindaperi, a village in Tamil Nadu, where his days include calls to Zoho’s US offices, code reviews, and time in the fields. He has spoken approvingly of the escape from consumption and status competition that village life offers.
Sure. That’s his choice to make. But for someone who depends on farming for a livelihood, leaving is rarely so simple.
Villagers estimate that Vembu owns more than 400 acres of farmland there, on which many local residents work. He can farm between calls to his software company and walk away from the fields whenever he likes.
Vembu spots and sometimes catches snakes on his morning walks. For agricultural labourers, snakebite is an occupational hazard.
They may inhabit the same village, but they are not living the same life. One has chosen simplicity; the other may have had very little choice in the matter.
The aesthetics of poverty are considerably easier to romanticise when backed by a multibillion-dollar exit option.
If a farmer wants to remain on his land because he loves farming, a free society should let him. If another wants to mechanise, expand his holding, and make as much money as possible, let him. If a third wants to lease his land and become an engineer, let him. If another wants to sell completely and use the proceeds to start a business in Hyderabad or Chennai, there is nothing morally inferior about that choice either.
A free market does not tell any of them what they ought to value. And there is no reason to demand from farmers a vow of poverty.
The objective of agricultural policy should not be to preserve the maximum possible number of farmers. It should be to make the people who currently farm as prosperous and productive as possible, while giving them every opportunity to do something else if they choose.
There is a crucial difference between protecting farmers and protecting farming as a way of life. The second can very easily come at the expense of the first. Reforms to land leasing, consolidation, and agricultural markets repeatedly run into the same problem: preserving the existing structure is easily presented as protecting the farmer.
For too long, India has celebrated the dignity of the farmer while tolerating the poverty of the farmer. Another sermon about the nobility of working for something other than money is not what Indian agriculture needs.
Farmers do not owe the rest of us a life of sacrifice because they happen to produce our dinner.
Adam Smith understood this in 1776. When will Vembu and India’s policymakers?
Ajay Mallareddy is the co-founder of Hyderabad-based Centre for Liberty. His X handle is @IndLibertarians. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)