IIT-GN students design tools to help farmers increase harvest

As a part of a course called Synthesis and Analysis of Mechanisms at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IIT-GN), students have developed working prototypes of machines designed for agricultural operations that farmers typically perform manually.

They were displayed on campus recently.

These prototypes include electric powered paddy harvester, pedal operated threshing machine, fruit harvester, onion harvester, pedal operated wheat harvester, manual milking machine, pesticide sprayer and a three-in-one plough.

IIT-GN faculty and instructor of the course, Prof Vineet Vashista, said, “The main aim of the class project is to study various farming operations and develop technical solutions to improve the output by reducing manual labour.”

He added, “In the absence of any discovery that increases the harvest , the best way forward is to improve the efficiency of various farming tasks.”

Most of the prototypes developed by the students were aimed to develop affordable devices which will decrease the amount of labour used by the farmers while addressing agronomical issues.

One of the students from the team which developed the milking machine, Subodh Kumar said, “The most common issue faced by farmers include knee joint and spine issues related to carrying heavy loads and bending down for long hours to work This is why we developed this affordable device to milk cows without having to bend down through the process.”