Swaraj Baggonkar Moneycontrol News
Tractor manufacturing leader Mahindra & Mahindra hit headlines after it showcased indigenously developed fully autonomous tractor last year but its prime rival John Deere feels that the average Indian farmer needs to get better price for his produce than driverless tractors.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, a top John Deere executive said the US-headquartered company will rather focus on making tractors and other agriculture equipments more affordable to Indian farmers than launch technology-heavy and expensive autonomous tractors here.
Last year, the Mumbai-headquartered Mahindra & Mahindra, which has a share of over 43 percent in the domestic tractor segment, showcased three tractors last year each with certain levels of autonomous abilities. The fully driverless tractor was set for launch by end of this year after securing a go-ahead from the government authorities.
"Let Mahindra go ahead with that. John Deere believes that India is way behind in precision farming. Farmers don't even buy implements from the manufacturers that will lead to efficient running of the tractor. This means there is a huge gap. It will take lot of time to move these consumers to autonomous tractors. It is important to first improve the farming techniques, raise agriculture output and help the farmer in getting a better rates for the produce than market driverless tractors to him," said the executive.
John Deere is one world's largest manufacturers of tractors alongside M&M. In India the company has about 9 percent share and is the fifth biggest after M&M, TAFE, Escorts and Sonalika.
John Deere has independently developed driverless tractor technology back in its home market where precision farming is already in advanced stages. Farming in India though is done through rudimentary and age-old techniques which results in significantly high levels of farm produce wastage and long man hours. The government is yet to allow the use of drones in farming, a precision farming technique which has taken off in backwards countries of Africa.
"Right now, I cannot comment if we are developing that technology ourselves. We have to wait to see how the market develops," added the executive.
Pawan Goenka, Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra, had said that the primary criteria to market driverless tractors is price. The manufacturing cost of a driverless tractor was coming to more than Rs 1 lakh over the conventional variant which ideally should be below Rs 1 lakh for it to become a mass market proposition.
M&M had said that it will start with the driver assist tractors before moving to quasi-driverless and finally completely autonomous.
Such driverless tractors are targeted at small farmers with land holdings between 20-40 acres. Such technology will be made available across all the three platforms of the company- Jivo, Nuvo and Yuvo.
The company also said that progressively such tractors will be exported to Japan and US but only after they establish themselves firmly in the Indian market which M&M expects to happen in 18 months after they are launched.
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