As India continues on the path of development, mechanisation is changing the way farming is carried out in the country.

Sundararam Verma who works as a scout for the National Innovation Foundation spends most of his time looking for innovations in farming.

He walks through village roads, knocking on doors of farmers and co-villagers in search of new and innovative ideas that may have found their way into the farms.

"I am a farmer. I use threshers myself, which is why I discussed with several people to find out the best types of thresher available," says Sundararam Verma, Scout, NIF.

In his search, Sundararam visited a farm where he found a thresher, which was attached to the tractor, and was superior to the conventional ones.

He found that Madanlal had designed a thresher that could thresh it all as any and every crop could go into the machine and the grains are thrown out clean and clear.

"When I heard about Madanlal's thresher, I went and met him. I saw his machine and realised that it's better than the conventional ones. I then put his innovation forward to NIF," adds Sundararam.

Traditionally, the job involved a manual process to separate the chaff or straw from the grain.

Eliminating constraints

However, threshing is now done by huge machines called threshers, which have a blower that sucks in the straw and throws out the clean grains.

But such threshers had a constraint, as the machines couldn't thresh all crops particularly peanuts whose shells would get stuck inside the machine.

However, Madanlal's innovation changed all that.

"First, I tested threshing peanuts in my machine. I realised they were getting stuck inside. So I doubled the number of blowers in the machine and increased the RPM."

"There were still a few problems and I realised that it was a problem caused by the mesh inside. I ordered one from Jaipur and fitted it in my thresher. Now, it works perfectly and can thresh all crops," says Madanlal, innovator.

Farmers who once had to thresh peanuts with their hands can now look at buying Madanlal's improved thresher.

However, the innovation comes at a price of close to Rs 2 lakh.

The innovator justifies the high cost, as his machine not only does it thresh all crops, including peanuts, but it also consumes around 3.5 litres of diesel per hour whereas traditional threshers consume around 5-6 litres per hour.

Although Madanlal has not been able to increase the quantity of crop getting threshed in his machine, he says that the grain that comes out is cleaner compared to the output of old threshers.

The threshing season in India is just about over. But come the time for the next harvest, the innovator is sure that a lot more farmers, like Sundaram Verma will be knocking on his doors once again.