Economics of Mechanised Harvesting

Tavngya plantation in North Bengal is an age-old practice. It has two principal aspects, (i) a dependable planting technique and (ii) readily available and dependable labour force from the conventional forest villages. As the pace of conversion of high forest into plantation has increased considerably, maintenance of the conventional forest villages in usual pattern has become uneconomic. Hence the conventional forest villages cannot be retained for a length of time. In future, forest workers may be drawn from a different kind of forest villages. There is also a visible drift of rural population towards urban areas due to more covetable employment in the various industries. Large scale harvesting depending primarily on manual labour is no longer possible because of the large areas under operation. The obvious course is to go over to mechanisation in the different stages of forestry operations and with this end in view, certain works are being done by tractors and various implements. The aim is to harvest economically and quickly, and to carry out subsequent ploughing of the land for taungya plantation. This paper is a brief study of the economics of mechanised harvesting and is based on the actual working for the last one year