All over the India Cotton growing has increased at a very rapid rate in the last few years. Especially after the introduction of BT Cotton seed, the acreage in which cotton has grown leaps and bounds in the last 2-3 years. This enhanced the demand of the labourers for harvesting cotton. Cotn is generally picked 2-3 times and due to shortage of lablour, and the high cost, farmers are resorting to plucking only twice thus leaving almost 15-20% crop unharvested. This is a huge loss to the Nation. Plucking the cotton manually also poses few problems. Firstly, the bark is also gets mixed up with the cotton as manual plucking is not precise and hence some part of the bark also gets collected along with the cotton while plucking. This ultimately fetches the farmer lesser price due to contamination. Secondly, manual plucking does not ensure complete plucking from the bushels as few require pulling the cotton with effort. Almost 5% cotton is estimated to be left on the plant. These aspects result in low price and low quantity for the farmer. Non- availability of labour in time also accounts for loss of cotton to the farmers. With so many uncertainties and difficulties, farmers are seriously looking for a device which brings higher productivity makes their lives better.

Mullapudi Satyanarayana, a farmer by profession and a school dropout has been facing these problems and was working for the last four years to find an appropriate solution which would bring some cheer to the farmers. This grassroots Innovator has toiled to develop a device which finally able to meet all the requirements of a cotton farmer and also caters for reducing the losses, and saves on time to the farmers. He evolved over the last four years by developing 11 versions to make it easy to handle, less consumption of fuel, less weight, higher rates of collection, clean collection of cotton, easy handling of collected cotton etc. His passionate, dedicated and relentless efforts have finally yielded and a very efficient Cotton harvester is now available for farmers.

At present the entire backpack cotton harvester weighs 15 Kg. In one litre of diesel, one person can operate the device for 3 hours. The average rate of collection is 100 kg per day. As the device clutches and sucks, only the cotton is drawn into the bag hanged on the shoulder resulting in a high grade and fetching more price for the farmer. It also leaves only less than 1% cotton on the trees unplucked due to its efficient clutching mechanism without adding any extra effort to the operator.

Innovator Satyanarayana wants to market his innovation as an eco friendly device. He is now solarizing the device which would eventually operate on the solar energy. A solar panel on the back of the operator will reduce the cost of engine, reduces overall weight, no fuel, no pollution and without jeopardizing any of the performance parameters of the device. In fact with so many positives, it is expected that the efficiency of the operator would go up resulting in higher rate of collection per day beyond one quintal.

The innovation could not have been more timely. Lakhs of farmers are awaiting for such device which provides them comfort, timely harvesting, better grade and higher collection of cotton. During interaction farmers who used the device were ecstatic and wanted to purchase it immediately with full down payment. A patented device Satynarayan’s Cotton harvester will be in the market soon with an estimated price of Rs 20000, the innovator needs to be lauded for resolving the perennial problems of cotton farmers across the country. Positive impact on millions of cotton growing farmers is there to see and it is all due to the dedicated and creative efforts of Mullapudi Satyanarayana a grassroots Innovator.

The contribution of Satyanarayana being highly significant to the millions of farmers needs to be recognized and duly awarded, which would bring lot of happiness to fellow farmers and inspire many people to bring about such useful innovations at grassroots level.