| Details of Innovation |
Laljibhai Karsanbhai Ramani has continuously been engaged in the mechanisation of agriculture for the past four decades. He listens carefully to wishful thinkings of mill and farm workers, conjuring up images of machines that may relieve them of their drudgery. He does not dismiss these as wishful thinking. On the contrary, he is inspired by the ideas and sets down to work on them. The result is mechanisation of agriculture in a small way.
It is one such wishful thought of a worker that inspired Laljibhai. One worker told him a couple of decades ago that if you want the complete harvest done faster, he would need a diesel engine. That was the cue, sufficient to set Laljibhai thinking and tinkering. He chopped and changed and tinkered with angles, sheets, shafts and pulleys. As the culmination of his effort, he came out with the very oil engine that the worker originally had wished for. It has got off the boards of his farm factory.
The prototype of the engine-driven thresher-cum-tractor is now ready. What's more, it is in use by Laljibhai himself in his farm. This threshing machine clears groundnut, wheat, millet, pulses, sunflower and soyabeen pods and seeds and gives out clean grain.
The tractor component comes first in Laljibhais scheme of thresher-cum-tractor. The tractor ploughs the field. But since Laljibhai does not manufacture it, he does not claim credit for it. But, all the same, it is an inspiration for him. For, he acknowledges the genesis. For thousands of years, farmers have been ploughing their fields with their own hands or with the help of bullocks. Then came the tractor, the machine that helped quicken and perfect ploughing. He thinks his thresher is also part of the genesis.
To run the threshing machine, it is necessary to have an oil engine fitted to it. He, however, regrets that the small farmer, of whom there are millions in this country, cannot afford his thresher. This is because it can be used only with a tractor, which is beyond the capacity of the small farmer.
Even so, there is an advantage: With the help of the tractor-cum-thresher the harvest work can be done in double quick time and the grain comes out clean according to its gradation. |
Honey Bee Network Knowledge & Innovation Database (HBNKIND)
