The Cotton Corporation of India (CCI)hasso far distributed 5543 kapas plucker machines valuing around Rs. 4 crores to 5543 marginal and small farmers in all the cotton growing states (including aspirational districts) under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
As CCI is a Nodal agency of Govt. of India under Ministry of Textiles for undertaking Minimum Support Price (MSP) operations of cotton in the event market rate of seed cotton falls below the MSP rates to protect the cotton farmers from distress sale. Therefore, the CSR budget of the Corporation remains very limited.Despite this constraint, the Corporation distributed kapasplucker machines to marginal and small farmers in all the cotton growing states.
Most of the cotton in India is manually picked which is a labour intensive operation. Unlike other major cotton producing Countries like USA, Australia etc, fully mechanized harvesting by big machines are not successful in India due to small land holdings of cotton farmers in India, sowing/picking pattern (3-4 picking) and different climatic condition in different States. Therefore, hand held kapasplucker machine is one of the option to bring down the cost for the farmers and a remedy for contamination at farm level due to manual picking.
Hand held kapasplucker machine is a light weight (about 600 gram) machine which has a pair of rollers inside having small edged teeth on their outer periphery and is operated by a light weight 12 volt. Cotton gets entangled with the rollers and is collected directly into collection bag attached to it. Design of machine makes it easy to operate at field and affordable i.e. at nominal cost of Rs. 8000 per machine (approx.).
Advantages of kapas plucker machines are as under:
- Reducing the risks of health hazards to cotton farmersin manual picking (i.e. risk of insect bite, back pains due to standing posture for long hours, bruises/cutting on legs & hands etc).
- Improve the cotton harvesting skills, reduce the dependency on scarce & costly labour and make cotton farmers “Atmanirbhar”
- Improve the quality of cotton by reducing contamination at farm level.
- Financial returns to cotton Farmers may improve by reducing harvest cost (reduced labour requirement), lesser trash & contamination and premium on sale of better quality cotton.
- Due to availability of indigenous good quality cotton, the quality of cotton yarn, textiles and value added products will also increase which may increase foreign exchange earnings.
In order to overcome the issues in manual harvesting of cotton and for improvement of quality of cotton by reduction in contamination at farm level, CCI started distribution of kapasplucker machine under its CSR activities.
State-wise Distribution of Kapas Plucker Machines by CCI under CSR is given below:
| State | Punjab | Haryana | Rajasthan | Gujarat | Maharashtra | MP | Telangana | Karnataka | Odisha | Tamil Nadu | Total |
| No. of hand held KapasPluckerMachines Distributed to Marginal and Small cotton farmers. | 100 | 135 | 120 | 600 | 839 | 626 | 547 | 1228 | 700 | 648 | 5543 |