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The cultivation of onions, a widely grown crop in the country, is set to get a mechanisation push.
The ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticulture Research, Bengaluru, has developed a range of equipment such as a seed drill for sowing of onions, diggers to harvest, de-topper to cut and separate the leaves from the bulbs and graders to sort and grade the produce.
The de-topper is the latest addition to the entire range, which has been commercialised by IIHR, said Harinder Singh Oberoi, Head of Post Harvest Technology & Agricultural Engineering.
The adoption of these machines is expected to help growers bring down input costs — mainly labour — and use less seeds, thereby bringing down their cost of cultivation by about a third, said G Senthil Kumaran, Principal Scientist, Agri Engineering, IIHR.
The per-acre cost of onion cultivation in Karnataka is estimated at ₹30,000 per acre.
While the leaf de-topper and grader are power operated, the digger is tractor drawn. The seeder is animal and tractor drawn but can be used manually also, said Kumaran, who led the team to develop these machines.
“The cost of this entire range works out to around ₹8 lakh, nearly one-fifth of the cost of imported machines,” Kumaran said.
Pilot project
The Karnataka Horticulture Department will be piloting the use of these machines in four districts of the State in the forthcoming kharif season, while other onion producing States such as Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Haryana have shown interest in adopting these machines, said Kumaran. “In Karnataka, the machines are being distributed to Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) in four districts under the World Bank aided scheme,” he added.
Further, the commercialisation of these machines would lead to mechanisation of 75 per cent of the processes in onion cultivation.
“Mechanisation in onion cultivation will now be on par with that of potato,” Kumaran said. Except for weeding, the entire functions are now mechanised. “It is difficult to mechanise weeding operations as the space between the plants is very less,” he added.
A couple of large retail chains and FPOs have already been using the graders developed by IIHR to sort the produce, Oberoi added.
Onions are grown on about 13.15 lakh hectares in the country and production for 2017-18 is estimated at 22.07 million tonnes.
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