Plucker's Bounty

Sickle Innovations is making harvesting easier and lucrative for apple and mango farmers.

- Bhavik Nair

In the summer of 2016, Nitin Gupta and Vinay Reddy of Sickle Innovations were headed to a conference in Hyderabad to display their innovation, a mango harvester — a long aluminium rod with a handle at one end and a clipper on the other with a catchment area for the fruits. The harvester could pluck the mango without much damage to the stem; something that traditional harvesting methods cannot achieve.

Their visit proved to be a success as they managed to sell all the 50 mango harvesters they had with them. It was at this event that a professor from an agriculture university in Jammu and Kashmir asked them if they could create a similar tool for apple picking. It sparked the duo’s curiosity, and marked the birth of a new product under the brand name Hectare.

THE BEGINNING

Sickle Innovations, which commenced operations in January 2014, was not a product of ideation but that which was born for the need to solve problems. “Back in college, we never started a project simply based on an idea. We tried and solved problems, primarily those that had a social angle to it,” says Gupta who hails from Srikaranpur, a small town in northern Rajasthan.

By the time he graduated as a mechanical engineer in 2008, Gupta was sure he wanted to start a company of his own. But since he was a fresher, he decided to gain some experience first, and eventually found a job with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). After almost three years, he quit and applied for a masters in product design at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru.