Usman Shekhani (51) hails from Kanker in Chattisgarh and earns his living through the repairing and sale of electronic goods.
Shekhani was determined to come up with an efficient machine for cutting bamboo that would be cheap, manually operated and affordable to the public at large. He promised Gulab Rao that one day something would come which would bring the cheer back to his face.
Shekhani’s attempts at developing this device started in 2001. It took him more than two years to transform his idea into a feasible innovation. In his first attempt to make the device, he used a single steel blade, then two in series and thus he tried various combinations till he finally found that five blades in series gives the perfect results. Five sticks of uniform size will be obtained from each chip and in one minute the cutter can be used ten times. Then he observed that there was a danger of cuts on the fingers so he added a rubber roller push to hold the chip in place. He has developed several prototypes in his aim of improving his innovation and making it easy and efficient. The major problems he faced during the development of the innovation were finding material and instruments.