Rice is the staple food for Telangana, requires about 50 lakh tons annually to feed the population. Rice is being cultivated both in kharif and rabi season as one of the most important crop in Telangana. During the year, 2016-17 rice crop was grown in an area of about 12.2 lakh hectares and produced 47.6 lakh tons of rice with the productivity of 3902 kg/ha. Comparing the productivity of rice over other states, Telangana was in first place by crossing the leading states like Punjab, Haryana, Tamilnadu and AP imported self-propelled transplanters have been using Telangana state for paddy transplanting to overcome the problem of labour scarcity during peak season of sowing. The field experiments were conducted in the farmer’s fields in a total area of 60 ha during Kharif and Rabi 2017-18 in different villages of Telangana State with RNR -15048 and KNM-118 varieties in sandy clay loam soil to ascertain the performance of popular Kubota and Yanmarmodel paddy transplanters which are commercially available. The performance parameters evaluated were missing hills, floating hills, number of seedlings/hill, plant to plant spacing, seed rate, forward speed, field capacity, cost of operation and yield. It was seen that the farmers are willing to shift from conventional to machine transplanting due to shortage of labour, availability of imported mechanical transplanters and constant government support through various schemes. From the field results, the observed total average cost of operation of the transplanters was found to be Rs. 5,925/ha and Rs. 6,459/ha over manual transplanting with Rs.9500/ha and saving in cost over conventional method was Rs.3, 575/ha and Rs. 3,049/ha. The breakeven point and payback period of Kuboto and Yanmar transplanters were observed as 43.45%, 2.3 years and 48.34%, 2.6 years respectively without nursery raising machine. The yield observed was on par with conventional method with 7.5 t/ha. The study showed that the mechanical transplanters will help the farmers and entrepreneurs in rice cultivation by reducing the human drudgery and labour problem.

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