Koppa, a small village in south Karnataka, is the only place where Narsimha Bhandari feels at home. After all it was here that the 53-year-old Narsimha was born and brought up.

When the NDTV team met up with him, Bhandari was on his way to meet a friend. But it was not just a social visit. It was a visit to enquire about the performance of his award winning innovation, an arecanut dehusking machine.

Arecanut is one of the important cash crops grown in the Chikmagloor belt of Karnataka. The commercial produce of the arecanut is the beetle nut and is a profitable crop for most farmers in this region.

But along with the profit the nut brings with it an enormous amount of labour. The areca is a tough nut to crack and peeling each nut means hard and long hours of labour for hundreds of farmers each day. It is this daily chore that Bhandari's innovation aims to simplify.

Narsimha's machine is run by a motor. It consists of a funnel like structure and has a series of blades inside. The nuts are fed into the machine through the funnel.

Arduous process

As each nut passes through the blades it gets peeled by the continuous rotation of the blades. Narsimha's machine simply motorises the arduous process of using blades and knives to manually peel arcanuts.

The machine costs around Rs 35000 and can peel areca of any size. But it was a long road to success for this school dropout. Narismha used to work in a hardware shop.

It was then that he started dabbling with what was available in his shop to come up with new products. Ten years and many models later Narsimha's arecanut de-husker was discovered by the national innovation foundation through one of its sister networks SRISTI.

His innovation was awarded the first prize and it also got him a princely sum of Rs one lakh. Today not just the foundation but also the local farmers of the region vouch for the machine's effectiveness and convenience.

Today, Bhandari runs his own workshop called Durga Engineering Works. So far he has been able to sell only four machines. But he hopes to get more financial and technical support from various quarters to help further develop and market his innovation.

"I have two-three innovations in mind. But I cannot talk about it right now. I will talk about it later," said Narsimha.

Narsimha is working towards being more patient and perseverant. He has already moved on to work something new. But he is keeping his new ideas strictly under wraps and just like the object of his innovation he too seems like a tough nut to crack!