Cheering SL’s coconut farmers with toddy tapping device
Maker Village in Kerala, India, a startup incubator, envisages becoming an entrepreneurial hotspot for the world, including Sri Lanka, by introducing a new toddy tapping instrument, top officials say.
“The advanced prototyping design and simulation centres can be accessed by makers around the world and our goal is to become the hub for hardware in South Asia and attract companies from Sri Lanka, Philippines, and Vietnam, etc.,” Rohan Kalani, COO Maker Village told the Business Times in an interview at Kerala Start-up Mission (KSUM), at their headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram, India last week.
He said that Nava Design, a start-up at Maker Village, has developed a patented technology for an automatic toddy tapping system with the electrically powered tapping devices and an extraction unit. “It’s called ‘ Sapper’ and is an automatic coconut palm tapping system developed for tapping toddy. Nava Design is working with a major arrack distillery in Sri Lanka to carry out a pilot test in their coconut farms. The project is estimated to be completed in a span of four months and the success of the pilot could make Nava a game-changer in this industry.”
Its founder, Charles Vijay Varghese worked in West Asia for 10 years where seeds of his company were sown. He had registered his company while working as an Assistant Unit Manager at Khimji Ramdas, business conglomerate in Oman. In July 2017, he quit his job and incubated the company in Kerala's Maker Village. “His family has a coconut farm where they have been toddy tapping for years and with the new invention, a coconut tree tapper has to climb up the tree to fix the device on the inflorescence,” Mr. Kalani explained. A thin and long pipe connects the device with the tank on the surface, where toddy is collected. Once the device is installed and switched on, a notification is sent to the farm manager, informing him/her of the same, through a mobile application. After installation, the robot sensor finely slices the sap to extract toddy. With the help of vacuum extraction, the tube deposits toddy in the collection tank and every day, on an average, 1.5 litres of toddy can be extracted from a single coconut tree.
A tapper has to climb one coconut tree three times a day for a period of three months during the productive life of a single inflorescence; resulting in climbing 270 times. It is possible to replace these 270 times of climbing with a single climbing through the installation of the electro- mechanical device for toddy extraction and vacuum enabled evacuation.
Maker Village promotes hardware- focused innovation and sets up labs and centres that emphasise on the current trend and emerging technologies of disruptive nature to bring India to the forefront of innovation in these areas and attract the best start- ups and innovators to the facility.