A machine that peels 600 kg of walnuts an hour.
Built by Mohd Shafi Ahanger
A practical machine built around a difficult, labour-intensive part of walnut processing.
Freshly harvested green walnuts must be peeled and dried as part of processing. Doing that by hand is slow, physically demanding and harsh on the skin—especially when an entire harvest arrives within a short season.
Mohd Shafi Ahanger, a grassroots innovator from Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir, understood the work around him. Born into a blacksmith's family and largely self-taught in repair and fabrication, he began by building a manual solution before developing a powered machine.
Green walnuts enter through a hopper and move along a horizontal conveyor through parallel channels. Spring-supported shredder plates accommodate walnuts of different sizes while applying the impact and friction needed to remove the green outer skin.
According to the National Innovation Foundation, the machine can process 500 to 600 kilograms per hour at a reported peeling efficiency of 98 percent. It turns hours of back-breaking seasonal labour into a continuous mechanical process.
This was not Shafi's first build. He taught himself mobile-phone repair and went on to develop devices including power supplies and a PCB-repairing system, for which he received a National Innovation Foundation award in 2017.
His walnut peeler received recognition at the 11th National Grassroots Innovation Awards in 2023. The story is a reminder that advanced engineering does not belong only to formal laboratories. Sometimes it begins in a village workshop, with a builder who knows the problem because he has lived beside it.