A 33-year-old man in India’s Jharkhand state has modified a scrapped motorcycle into a low-cost tractor tiller, using his experience as a two-wheeler mechanic. Mahesh Karmali, a resident of Uncha Ghana village in Hazaribagh, some 40km from the district headquarters town, was employed by the Baja Auto Showroom at Pune in Maharashtra until January this year but financial troubles in the company left him suddenly jobless. The Grade VI dropout returned to his village, hoping to engage in farming as a way of eking out a living for his family.
The jobless man, however, was shocked when he was told by his family that his brother had sold off the two oxen he had bought for ploughing the farmland without consulting him. “Pushed to the wall and with no oxen to till the land, I decided to do something to plough my farm without investing too much money. Subsequently, I bought a Bajaj Chetak Scooter as scrap for Rs4,251 and worked over the next three days to convert it into a power tiller. I spent another Rs12,000 to remodel it,” Karmali told.
“Now the machine I have invented by me can plough 4,000 square meters of land on just 2.5 liters of petrol,” exclaimed the youth. According to him, normal tractors use more fuel than his low-cost tiller. But there is a challenge when using the machine. One has to walk alongside the machine while it ploughs the land. “I am now trying to develop an advanced version of this power tiller so that one can sit on the vehicle while the farm is being ploughed, quite like a tractor,” he explains.
Local villagers are now making a beeline to the home of the youth to have a glimpse of the low-cost power tiller and benefit from this affordable machine which costs barely about Rs15,000 whereas a normal tractor in India costs roughly around Rs600,000 — far beyond the reach of common farmers. The new invention comes barely days after a youth from Chapra town in Bihar’s Saran district transformed a second-hand Tata Nano car to look like a helicopter. The car has all the features of a helicopter although it can’t fly. However, it has become a talk of the town and there is a scramble among the local villagers to book it for auspicious occasions such as weddings.
