Traditionally, sugarcane cultivation requires huge quantity of seed material nearly 7.5 to 10 tonns per ha, which accounts 10-15% of total the productivity. The seed multiplication rate of sugarcane is very low (1:8). Due to bulky nature of propagating material, very low average germination (35-40%), the non uniform and inadequate germination of crop causes huge fluctuation in productivity. Planting of sugarcane crop with pre germinated settling plants is the best solution for improving seed health, seed multiplication ratio and uniformity in plant population, which ultimately assures higher sustainable crop yield. The foremost requirement of settling raising and transplanting work is the availability of cost effective cutting tool for detaching uniform size mini single bud setts.

Many sugar mills and farmers of southern states, had successfully adopted this method, but in north India the unavailability of motorized single sett cutters was one of the biggest bottleneck towards adoption of settling transplanting techniques. The cutters were manufactured in southern states, viz., Maharashtra, Tamilnadu etc but due to their higher price and huge transportation cost there was least interest in adoption of setting transplanting method by the sugar mills of the region.To address this issue, ICAR-SBIRC, Karnal have designed and developed, a cost effective single budded sett cutting tool namely “Quatro Sugarcane Single Bud Cutter” which begged design patent in the country “Design No. 297432”. Nearly 7-8 thousands single bud setts, adequate to grow settlings for transplantation in an acre area, can effectively be detached in one hour by this machine, when it runs at full capacity i.e.

four persons operating on each cutting slot of the machine. The technology was commercialized by giving licensing rights to M/s HanzraEngg Works, vill-Bansa, Karnal. Nearly 53 units had been supplied to the sugar mills and farmers of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar and Uttarakhand states.