Anurag Gangwar, Aditya Kumar, Hrishikesh Somchatwar, Nikita Tiwari
Summary
A typical salt farmer digs 12-15 wells every season out of which only 3-4 wells bore brine-water for salt farming. Each of such well is manually dug using a Phavada & takes around 2-3 days for each such well. These wells are around 1-2ft in diameter. The farmers check soil in these well by touch and feel and get to know if there is water available or not, based on which they then insert a boring pipe to get out water. In total, it takes a salt farmer 30-40 days of time and effort to dig wells and find wells with water inside, which the team sought to reduce. The team realized that there is a need for more effective methods for well digging which will allow the farmer to start growing salt earlier and hence increase their production. The team has developed a manually operated rotatory auger blade well digger which can be operated by 2 people and can dig a 15ft hole in 4-5 hours only which reduces the whole well digging procedure to just 4-5 days and in the rest of the days, the farmer can start producing the salt and hence gets additional 20-30 days to produce salt which adds onto his revenue directly.