TO STUDY THE ROLE OF ARECA NUT IN ECONOMIC GROWTH OF KADAMTALAANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ISLANDS

Abstract

Agriculture is now one of the most important sectors in the Indian economy. Areca nut Cultivation is one of the major livelihoods of farmers of Kerala and Karnataka. Labor Problems in every sector is leading to mechanization of processes. Agricultural sector is also facing such problem due to which most of the farmers tend to give up the practice. Areca nut cultivation is a long process involving harvesting, separating the fruits from bunches, moving the areca nut to ground, drying, de-husking, separating, bagging. Several machines are being developed to help farmers to aid the aforementioned processes. Areca nut collecting and bagging machine is a new one among them. The machine is intended to collect areca nuts from ground directly to gunny bags fixed in a moveable trolley. After the bag is filled the trolley can also be used to move the bags to store rooms. The machine is operated by single person so that farmer himself can use it. In addition, since the machine doesn’t use any power units, it can be used anytime. Since the machine is manually driven, the machine is made lightweight materials to reduce the user effort. The major enabling mechanism in the machine is an inversion of slider crank mechanism that pulls the areca nuts from ground. A belt driven Conveyer carries the collected areca nuts up into the bags.

Keywords: Arecanut Growers, Arecanut Cultivation.