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Paddy farming in India needs extensive water usage. Due to the rapidly declining ground water and ever increasing monsoon uncertainty, there is significant drive on water conservation for paddy farming through sustainable agriculture practices. The wide variability of irrigation water in Indian rice field, as high as 160 mm, necessitates an extra 100 mm of water in the field to provide complete water coverage. This is primarily due to inaccurate manual land leveling, often practiced in Indian paddy farming. In the present work, architecture of laser land leveler has been created by integrating low cost electronics, hydraulics and GPS technology. This paper will provide an overview of the current practices and suitable operating mode to meet the future demand on land leveling. The presentation would compare the laser land leveler with GPS land leveler solution architectures. The technological differences along with individual merits and limitations would be detailed.

The acute power shortage in rural India results in significant trade-offs on the living style of people residing there. As high as 10-15 hrs of load shedding, drives people to plan the work as per availability, limit the night time activities and depend on diesel generators for special events. The present work evaluates tractor, which has a high penetration in rural India (20 tractors per 1000 hectares) as a techno-commercially feasible alternative for rural electrification. The “Tractor-Electric Power” architecture has been redesigned, by adding inverter to the tractor battery and evaluating alternate architecture and applications. A mathematical model has been developed and simulations have been made by considering operating constraints, to evaluate the efficiency of this solution among various solutions.