Adoption status of safety measures on threshers

The introduction of thresher has reduced the cost, time and labour requirement beside additional benefit of quality bhusa, but it has also presented host of problems, notably serious human accidents during threshing. Realizing the gravity of the situation of thresher accidents, several remedial measures were under taken by introducing various types of test codes, recommendation and dangerous machine act 1983. Despite all these efforts the occurrence of thresher accident was found maximum (35.2%) as compared to other agricultural machines. The views of the manufacturers and farmers were collected and compiled to know the status of safety measures on threshers and hindrance in their adoption. It was observed that certified feeding chute was being used by 63.4 per cent manufacturers. The marking, cautionary notice and literature provided was not up to the mark. The lack of knowledge, economic constraints, cumbersome procedure of testing, hindrance in maintenance and operation due to full covers and overall no effect of these measures on sale were found as the main reasons for not providing safety measures by the manufacturers. Sixty per cent of the farmers felt the need of adjustable and foldable feeding platform, 85% suggested automatic feeding system, and 70% preferred recommended dimensions of feeding conveyor whereas all of them were in favor of feed reversing mechanism.