The mini sugarcane harvester is not just a B.E. final year project but it is an attempt to help the sugarcane farmers as well as those people who work at the sugar factory in Goa.
It is not even a year back since we have heard about the sugar factory at Goa which is on the verge of shutting down. This brings to a question, Why? It has been observed that only one third of the sugarcane that is required to fulfil the factory demand is produced in Goa and the rest must be imported from other states like Maharashtra. The inability of Goan farmers to fulfil the factory demands and the cost associated with import of sugarcane has led to this fact.
The reason why the Goan farmers cannot supply 100% of required sugarcane is because most of the farmers don’t prefer sugarcane production due to high cost of harvesting and unavailability of the labour. This problem is solved by our sugarcane harvester by firstly reducing the required labour as well as bringing down the cost of harvesting. This machine is a onetime investment whose cost can be recovered within two to three harvesting seasons for a farmer who own about three to four hectors of land on an average. This machine has been built after consulting many sugarcane farmers to meet their needs.
The project was completed in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of BE in Mechanical Engineering by Kashinath Haldankar, Ashwin Shetgaonkar, Rushab Salgaonkar, Presvelt Rodrigues, Kshitij Jangam under the guidance of Prof. Saish Rivankar for the academic year 2018-19.
