Mahua Nut Cracker

6 min readOct 18, 2018

The Mahua tree is a widely found tree in the central and northern
part of India. Its flowers and fruits are used for various purposes.

The flowers are used to produce alcohol and
getting relief from cough/cold and joint
pain when used for massage.

The seeds inside the fruit are used to
extract oil which is mainly used for cooking purposes.

Field Visit

The field study happened in a tribal area on the border of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. We lived with one of the families for a period of 3 days to understand the relation the community shares with the Mahua tree and its seeds. It was important to understand their context of living and the resources available to them in terms of labour, manufacturing processes, disposable capital. We learned a lot about their culture and how they live. We observed their daily routine and involvement in various tasks.

Talking to the residents of Chota Udaipur provided us with most of the working information that we needed. Talking to them in the first place was a major hurdle for my team and even more so for me. My team-mates found it hard to understand their dialect of Gujarati while I did not know Gujarati at all. My language skills felt useless. This is where I had to take a crash course in interviewing for my team mates from engineering backgrounds. Avoiding leading questions. Exploring reasons. Probing deeper. The 5 WHYs. We recorded all the interviews with consent and their transcription was later helpful in analysing the responses. I too would ask follow up questions from my limited interpretation of the live conversation. They explained to us, in detail, the various steps and processes of collecting the seeds and getting the oil from them.

For most of my notes I relied on observation since talking wasn’t working out. I was a fly on the wall and engaged in keen observation to gather information. This was when it first hit me how much does not come out when you just listen but don’t observe. Since I had no way of listening in this case, observation proved to be a boon.

Users say what they have observed and recall, not what they haven’t observed or can’t recall

They seemed to skip out on detail they thought was unimportant or obvious, while I, being a complete outsider found a lot of the things unintuitive for myself.

Problem Identification

We made mindmaps, Process maps and affinity maps to find potential areas of intervention. The aim of the summer school was to identify and work on problems that are not usually targeted by Academia, Industry or Government because of their small scale/Commercial in-feasibility/small affected population etc.

The problems identified:

Reduce the amount of time spent in collecting the seeds/flowers
Make the process of breaking open the seed easier & faster
Enable communities to press oil on their own(preferably cold pressed)

In consultation with our mentors and amongst the team, we decided to focus on the process of breaking open the Mahua seed.

Problem Statement:

“How might we save the kids from the drudgery of breaking open the Mahua seeds?”

Ideation

A Hand cranked front facing drum, which contains steel balls to crush the seeds

This technique is Robust, cheap and easy to implement & replicate.

Details of Design & Fabrication

Steel drum 10” diameter, 5mm thickness
Handle made of 4mm steel sheet
Pillow block ball bearing
Steel balls 30mm*10, 50mm*5 diameter
Rubber wheels with fix castor*2

Completed Prototype

Internal fins were added to the drum to take the Steel balls higher

Testing

The white part can now be separated and dried

Pros of Product for Tribal Rural context

Areas of improvement for Further work

Optimize to reduce weight
Improve efficiency of cracking by experimenting with more sizes and a mix of sizes of Steel balls(Here, only 50mm, 30mm & 20mm balls were tried)
A very high need to replace the fabricated parts with locally available ones like Milk containers/Paint Cans and Bicycle pedal arms etc. to both bring down cost and make it easier to source parts & repairs

The team had Hard Matarkar, Kuldeep Koriya and me. The full report for the project is here. The product was fabricated at NIF’s(National Innovation Foundation, Govt. of India) Fablab in Amarapur, Gujarat. Our mentors were from SRISTI. It is spearheaded by Prof. Anil Gupta, who works with grassroots innovation.

The trips that are organised with volunteers to go to remote areas on foot and look for innovations are called **Shodhyatras**, led by Professor Anil Gupta.

SRISTI reaches out to these remote areas, collects these innovations from the grass-root level and then recognises, rewards and helps these innovators. They provide aid and support structures to support these innovations and they document and database all the innovations and make them publicly available so that people might purchase and support these products.

The project is also published on Sristi Summer School.