Presently, manual transplanting method is being adopted at most of the area under vegetable cultivation. Manual transplanting one has to make a dug by hand and place the seedling in the soil and cover it. All operations need to be done in bending posture and very tedious. The labour and time consuming; it consumes the 260-320 man-h/ha. Semi-automatic vegetable transplanters are available in India for bare root, plug and pot type of seedlings. But they are too costly for small farmers. Therefore, a need was felt to develop a transplanter low cost, lightweight which can be operated at less efforts and higher work rate. Hence, hand-held vegetable transplanters for transplanting of vegetable seedlings on ridge/raised bed and plastic mulch has been developed to provide a solution to the manual operation at small farms. A low cost manually operated single row vegetable transplanter was developed for transplanting of plug and pot type vegetable seedlings on ridges and mulch beds. It consisted of the jaw assembly, delivery pipe, lever, handle, spacing marker, and frame. Operating principle of the developed transplanter involves the raising the transplanter up to one feet height and allow to free fall in the soil, dropping the seedling in the seedling delivery tube, pressing the lever in upward direction which enable the jaw to open the soil and seedling was placed in the soil by gravity and lifting the transplanter with open jaw and close the after raising the transplanter by one feet height. It was evaluated for inter and intra-row spacings of 45×45 cm and 60×60 cm. Manual transplanting on ridges (MTR) and on plastic mulch beds (MTP) was compared with developed transplanter on ridges (MOTR) and on plastic mulch beds (MOTP). The transplanting rate using single labour was found to be 8, 5, 16 and 11 seedlings per min for MTR, MTP, MOTR, and MOTP, respectively. The field capacity was calculated as 0.009-0.017; 0.007-0.0012; 0.019-0.033 and 0.013-0.039 for MTR, MTP, MOTR, and MOTP for both the spacings respectively. Similarly, field efficiency was 30-41%; 21-28%; 61-79% and 42-57%. Moreover, cost of operation (Rs/ha) it was found to be 2571-1416; 3770- 2121; 1324-745 and 1884 -1060 Rs/ha. The time saving over manual transplanting is 52 and 50% as in MOTR and MOTP, respectively. The weight of developed transplanter is 2 kg and the cost is Rs. 350. Developed transplanter is lightweight, low-cost machine found suitable for transplanting of vegetable seedlings.