Ginning Training Centre, CIRCOT, Nagpur.
Ginneries in India perform badly due to large involvement of untrained manpower for each and every unit operation. More the manual handling of cotton more is the quality deterioration. Automation in ginneries has resulted in considerable reduction in manpower required for material handling. Manpower required is 21.02-man hrs/bale in conventional factories whereas 7.49 man hrs/bale and 6.37 man hrs/bale for semi automatic and automatic factories, respectively. Manpower required in semi automatic and automatic factories was found to decrease by 64.36 and 69.69%, respectively over the conventional factories. The maximum manpower was required for seed cotton handling in all types of factories. Automation in ginneries has brought down female workers to 13% in semi automatic ginneries and almost nil in automatic ginneries as against about 62% in conventional ginneries. Adoption of new ginning technology has resulted in improvement in cotton fibre quality, higher and uniform production rates, decrease in contamination and above all saving in labour. Automation in ginneries has reduced the drudgery of work and improved the ergonomic conditions. The workers, in ginneries are untrained and unskilled. At present, the unloading of seed cotton, heap making, bale bagging, weighing and marking, bale loading and unloading etc are not being touched upon for automation in India. Suitable devices and systems can be developed in order to make the ginneries fully automatic.
