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Paddy Transplanter

Low-cost Manual Operated Machine for farmers

Apurwa Masook 1 Stories

Saturday March 04, 2017 , 2 min Read

Bargarh district, is one of the highest paddy producing districts of Odisha which is close to our university. Paddy farming is labor intensive. Paddy requires to be transplanted which is a very tedious task and causes various ailments to farmers. We – Pranay Panda, Ranjan Panda, Tatwamsiddha Nanda, Rahul Kumar Nayak, Sohan Roy (all from B. Tech second year Mechanical Engineering), technical members of Idea & Innovation cell, VSSUT (formerly UCE), Burla, Odisha – decided from the beginning that we would base our innovative project for the wellbeing of farmers. We met with some 30 farmers from Bargarh and Sambalpur district and observed this and thought of a solution. The market available motorized paddy planting machine costs around INR 1,00,000 even after the government subsidy which the farmers cannot afford. This triggered us to come up with a low-cost hand-operated paddy transplanting machine which could be used by a farmer of any income group. Our work began with software simulations and CAD designs. After repeated tries we finally finished our working prototype, built from scrap materials such as bearings, bicycle chain, steel plates, iron strips, iron rods, etc., and cost only Rs. 1500/-. But if more machines would be manufactured in mass, the production cost will significantly reduce. We are guided by the Faculty Advisor of Idea & Innovation cell, Prof. Bandan Kumar Bhoi and the mentor for the project Bodhisattwa Sanghapriya (Electrical and Electronics Engineering third-year student) Secretary, Idea & Innovation cell; who is among regular innovators of our university. This is why we believe our efforts will be successful. We are continuosly working on the machine to improve its efficacy and achieve desired commercialization.