Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering Nabibagh, Berasia Road, Bhopal-462 038
The self propelled rice transplanters are costly, complicated and difficult to repair in rural areas. The tractor or conventional power tiller mounted transplanters have problems of mobility, maneuverability and rut formation in puddled soil. Manually operated rice transplanter seems to be the solution at present for rice farmers in developing countries. The difficulties encountered in previously available manual rice transplanters have been eliminated and a new design of 6 row manually operated rice transplanter called ‘SARAL-6’has been developed and evaluated. The salient feature of SARAL-6 is reverse screw mechanism for seedling tray indexing. During evaluation the rice transplanter could transplant 0.036 to 0.040 ha/h at a cost of Rs. 569.60 to Rs. 616/ha with total transplanting faults ranging from 0.9 t0 5.25%.
