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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Mechanical solutions -Harish Damodaran

Mechanical solutions -Harish Damodaran

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published Published on Nov 3, 2018   modified Modified on Nov 3, 2018
-The Indian Express

Forcing machinery on farmers without giving a thought to the economics of their utilisation can prove counter-productive.

There are three main impediments to farm mechanisation in India.

The first is cost, which, for a standard 50-horsepower tractor, today averages around Rs 6.5-6.8 lakh. But a tractor is just a source of power and traction, and only as good as the farm implements it can pull. The most basic tractor-drawn tiller/cultivator used in seedbed preparation before sowing costs Rs 18,000-30,000, rising to Rs 50,000-60,000 for disc plough (which does the primary opening and loosening of the soil) and Rs 60,000-75,000 for harrow (used for secondary tillage). If the farmer invests in more heavy-duty equipment such as rotary tiller (also called rotavator), reversible plough (for deep tillage) and baler (which compresses hay/straw into compact easier-to-handle bundles), the costs would go up further, to Rs 1-1.2 lakh, Rs 1.4-1.6 lakh and Rs 2.75 lakh, respectively.

The second major constraint is the small size of holdings, which, in turn, makes mechanisation still more unaffordable for the average Indian farmer. Linked to the first two is a third factor — the number of hours of machinery use. If that is low, there is little economic sense for any farmer to own a tractor and matching implements. The recommended norm for usage of tractors, allowing recovery of the fixed investment cost, is 1,000 hours annually, which could include 600 hours for agricultural operations (assuming 10 hours daily for two cropping seasons over 60 days) and 400 hours for non-farm purposes. As against this, the actual average figure in India is hardly 750-800 hours.

It is worse in machinery such as Happy Seeder that the government is now pushing to prevent farmers from burning left-over stubble and loose straw resulting from combine harvesting of paddy. This tractor-driven device, which enables farmers to sow wheat even on fields containing standing stubble, costs roughly Rs 1.65 lakh.

According to Pritam Singh Hanjra, a farmer from Urlana Khurd village in Madlauda tehsil of Haryana’s Panipat district, a Happy Seeder takes just over an hour to plant an acre of wheat. “If I own 10 acres of land, it will be used for 10-11 hours in a year. Why would I invest Rs 1.65 lakh in a machine that is going to lie idle for much of the year?” he asks.

Please click here to read more.

The Indian Express, 1 November, 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/farming-india-farm-machinery-agriculture-5428058/


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