Coimbatore : Indian agriculture is 48 per cent mechanised and it will take another 20 years to increase to 70 per cent, a senior official in Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) Delhi, said today.

The government of India through department of Agricultural Cooperative centres and Customer Hiring Centres (CHC) is encouraging farmers to buy farm implements and machineries with up to 80 per cent subsidy in some cases, ICAR Deputy Director General. Dr. K. Alagusundaram, said.

In his address to the Agricultural Machinery Mela, organised at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) here, Alagusundaram said that around 3,000 such CHCs have been started in Punjab and Haryana alone.

He highlighted the role of two machineries — happy seeder and straw chapper–in bringing down the smoke days from 58 to 3 days in these States, decreasing straw burning by 45 percentage.

Lauding the effort of the government in allocating Rs.1,151 crore towards this purpose, he asked the farmers to knock at the doors of scientific institutions for technological knowhow on farm technologies.

TNAU Vice-Chancellor, Dr N Kumar highlighted the growing importance of agricultural equipment for achieving higher work efficiency.

He suggested a “Customer feedback approach” for farm machineries as being done by car manufacturers and this approach would fine tune the performance efficiency of machineries so as to have wider acceptance.

Three farmers Saravanan of Namakkal, Sugavanam Sivaprakasam of Sandhiyur and S. Duraisamy of Karur were presented with the best beneficiary farmers award. and 20 appreciation certificates were also issued to farmers who have adopted farm machinery technologies on a larger scale.