Madhya Pradesh farmer turns junk scooter into jugaad tiller

BHOPAL: Sitting idle during the long lockdown , a farmer in a small village in MP's Chhatarpur has created a jugaad tiller from a scrapped scooter.

"I looked at the lockdown as an opportunity and created a machine for my farm. Tillers cost at least Rs 50,000 to Rs 60,000, but I made one from junked parts," said Ashish Kumar Awasthi, who owns 5 acres in Toriya village, about 50km from Chhatarpur town and 350km from Bhopal.

Ashish was tending to his lemon-grass crop one day when he realized that weeds had covered large swathes of his field and he was staring at a massive weeding operation to save his crop. "The machine would cost a lot, not a risk I wanted to take in these times. I had to sit through the lockdown and don't have any money to spare on costly agricultural equipment," Ashish said.

Instead of twiddling his thumbs, he decided to put them to better use. "I wondered if I could innovate a multipurpose machine on my own. I was thinking, and looking around aimlessly, when my eyes fell on an old scooter I had parked for long. It just lay in a corner, rusting," he said. "I am a science graduate , and would participate in science-model exhibitions in my schooldays. It all came back. It was fun," he said.

Ashish dusted some tools, borrowed some and began reassembling the pieces of junk. "I had a design in my mind, and slowly it began taking shape," he said. Friends helped him weld. The rest he did on his own. The gizmo, finished in a couple of weeks, can be used as a weeding machine as well as a tiller, he said, adding: "Separately, they would cost Rs 40,000 and Rs 60 ,000."

The finished product looks like a deconstructed scooter. "There's space beneath the engine to fit iron nails of different designs for diverse agriculture uses. I can work my entire 5 acres on less than 1 litre of petrol," he said.