Doing her doctorate from Department of Agriculture and Food Engineering, IIT, Kharagpur

Application of indigenous technology in water resources development:

The advent of mechanical power and modern machinery revolutionized the technology of water lifting to meet any requirement. But for smallholdings, usually these pumps are under-utilized and characteristics of these higher capacity pumps do not match with low yielding characteristics of wells. Because of unavailability or uncertainty regarding hydroelectric power supply or poor economic background prevent the farmer from going for these costly pumps.

Hence there is a necessity of a medium head and medium discharge pump which can be produced and maintained at village level, suitable for areas where water table is at a depth of 2-3 m. This Project was undertaken with the prime objective of developing a bicycle operated duplex pump suited to the high water table regions of the state, keeping the energy requirement safely within the human capacity. Pedal operated pump have considerable advantages over hand pumps, since, leg muscles are more powerful than hand muscles. If the body weight of the operator could also be utilized, the effectiveness might be amplified. For continuous pedaling operation, the safe energy output of a man was taken as 0.1 H. P.The discharge was calculated as 1.5 lt/s keeping energy expenditure in safe limits. Stroke of the pump was calculated as 14.3 cm.