Nowadays farmers suffer due to the acute shortage of labor to undertake the cultivation activities in villages and also the suffering of farmers due to lack of equipment in the Indian market, and even oxen has become more costly for farmers.
At this point in time, Kadavendi Mahipal Chary, (42 years old) from Hyderabad, has built an affordable farming machine, and that machine will cut labor costs and cultivate fields. Know how he got the idea to build a machine and how it succeeded, and many more.
Inspiring Story of 10th Class Dropout in Telangana
Kadavendi Mahipal Chary was a 10th-class dropout who was unable to complete his formal education due to financial constraints. He started working as a bike mechanic and learned to repair tractors in a town near his village Parkal in Hyderabad.
He started his job as an assistant but soon he became good at repairing vehicles. Later, he returned to his village and took up farming. Even though he had 2 acres of land, he was unable to hire the cows for cultivation.
After spending money on wages and rent for animals, he thought about how he could overcome the problem that he was facing. And he thought of building a cultivator of his own.
In 2011, he started designing the mini cultivator which replaces manpower and dependency on oxen. While designing the machine he first used an auto-rickshaw engine but that did not work.
Even though he failed, he didn’t give up on his innovation and went to Hyderabad to purchase an engine made in China. Once it was worked he gathered up other parts with scrap material and built a cultivator machine by the end of the year.
This successful cultivator machine can run upto three hours on 1 liter of diesel. The machine is mounted with a 4 hp engine with a width of 22 inches. The accelerator is provided on the left-hand grip.
By this, you can cover an area of 3 acres. And doesn’t need many people to operate this machine, only one member is needed. With the success of this machine, he was encouraged to start manufacturing cultivators.
Chary says “Running this cultivator is easier than riding a scooter”. While other farmers are spending a lot of wages for workers, for upto Rs. 1 lakh, he just spent half of it and built a machine that can be used repeatedly.
Due to this, he got many orders to build it for others. So finally, in 2012 he started “ Varun Engineering Works”. From this company, farmers can buy cultivators and other farming-related equipment at low cost.
Many machines were sold in other parts of India before COVID-19 but after covid, he got a huge demand for buying people from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. He even machines according to customers’ thoughts.
Among the products manufactured by him are 22-inch cultivators mounted with a 4 hp engine allowing farmers to use it in places where crops are planted over 22 inches apart.
Affordable and User-Friendly Machine Innovation
He built the machines that he innovated by assembling the engines from Kolhapur, and material as well as gears from Hyderabad. Varun Engineering Works has sold 4000 cultivators to date. Each cultivator is sold at the cost of Rs. 45000 to Rs. 55000.
For the purpose of light in fruit gardens and dryland farms, Chary made a version with a 5 hp engine. Now he has 12 employees and his other innovations include a power weeder and a mini tractor.
Presently Mahipal working on a mini tractor that runs on battery. He was bestowed with the President’s Award, in 2015 and also got the national entrepreneurship award in 2018 for his innovations.
Key Takeaways
Through the innovations of Mahipal, many farmers are happy, and one farmer named Visweswara, who bought the cultivator 2 years ago also gave testimony that he was able to save Rs.50000 for every season due to this cultivator and it is a one-time investment and he said he had not done any maintenance till now.
Mahipal is glad that every his machines is making farmers’ lives better.