Grassroot Innovations

Incense sticks are mostly manufactured by rural/tribal people using knives, which is very tedious, time consuming and risky. Electricity operated high capacity machines are only suitable for and affordable by industries and are not useful for rural poor who make sticks at home. Ralte and Sailo have developed a manually operated machine, which can slice bamboo strips as well as convert the strips into sticks. One needs to load the thick bamboo piece and slide the cutter to and fro through the handle. This results in 1.2 mm thin slices of bamboo. These slices are collected and at a time about 50 slices are fed vertically. The cutter is again moved to and fro resulting splints of 1.2 mm width and thickness at a time. An average person can make about 5000 splints per hour.