Name : Ranjeet Ghorai
District & State : Bankura, West Bengal
Category : Engineering
Award : Consolation
Award Function : 6th National Grassroots Innovation Awards
Award Year : 2012
Innovation Description
A farmer from Bankura, Ranjeet Ghorai (35) has developed a parboiled paddy spreader, which is manual and easy to operate.
For sun drying, the spreading of parboiled rice (paddy) is conventionally done manually using a tray. The parboiled paddy is very hot and labourers get burned and blister many a times. In order to solve this problem, Ranjeet has developed a simple but an effective par-boiled paddy spreading machine. It is a trolley having a sluice gate kind of opening at the bottom where the size of the opening can be adjusted. While carrying the par-boiled rice to a different site for drying, the opening is kept closed. It can spread about 800 kg par-boiled paddy in five minutes. This machine can also be used for spreading cow dung, compost etc in the farm field and there is no need of hiring any labour for this purpose.
Prior art discloses that sun drying is very common and oldest method of drying the parboiled paddy, crops and seeds before processing/storage. The interaction with users revealed that even today the task of spreading is done manually using scoops or spades in the region. This is a very time consuming and laborious task. A similar innovation found in NIF database is a parboiled paddy and oil spreader developed by R. Ravi from Erode, Tamil Nadu, which is described elsewhere in the book.