Chandigarh University students develop multi-purpose crop residue manager

Mohali: Crop residue and stubble burning has been a major problem that the famers and governments of various states have been recently facing and there has been many solutions that are currently worked upon in this regard. The state of Punjab accounts for 20 per cent share in the annual paddy production of India while it accounts for 40 per cent of the total wheat production in India. But the real problem lies is that the 11 million ton of rice production leaves behind 21 million ton of straw out of which 75 per cent is burnt by the farmers due to lack of any proper crop residue management in the country.

With a view to reduce the problem of crop residue and which can in-turn help in controlling the problem of stubble burning that can reduce environmental pollution, a team of Mechanical Engineering students of Chandigarh University have come-up with an innovative and economical solution known as 'Multi-purpose Crop Residue Manager'.

Engineering students based from Punjab, Dilpreet Singh, Navej Sindhi, Urvish Agnihotri, Ranjan Kumar and Sahil from Himachal Pradesh have devised the economical crop residue manager that can help the farmers to cut the crop residue from roots in the farms. "The farmers of India are already under heavy loan debt and hence cannot invest in costly machines such as Happy Seeder which costs around Rs. 1.40 lacs and as a result the famers find it easy & economical to just burn the crop residue in the fields itself that results in environment pollution," said Dilpreet Singh.

"Being a son of farmer myself, I understand the problems of Indian farmers so I decided along with my friends to work on the economical solution to this problem," added Dilpreet. "This is how we all started to work on this project and we got all support from our mechanical department in the university." While sharing the technological aspects Dilpreet said, "We have attached a handle to the movable machine which runs on a 14.25 hp engine and has the efficiency to harvest 1 acre of land in around 40 minutes consuming just 1 liter fuel."

The machine which comes with three attachments that can be used depending upon the type of crop can deeply cut the crop residue from root and hence no residue is left in the field. "The total cost for our research to develop the machine was Rs. 25000 which is currently manually driven but we working on the project to upgrade it so that it can be attached to a tractor.

Once the commercial production of the machine starts we can further reduce the cost price of the Multicrop Residue Manager to be around 18000 and hence providing an economical solution to the Indian farmers," said Navtej. "Yet another problem can be solved with this machine is that the multipurpose machine can be used for shredding and mowing also by the farmers which will further reduce the burden of the farmers to own multiple machines," he added.