Characterization of Drudgery of Farm Women in the Soybean Production System
A sample of 50 farm women involved in soybean production system was selected from five villages of Parbhani district. Pretested interview schedule was used to collect the data. The activities performed by the farm women in selected production system were
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Characterization of Drudgery of Farm Women in the Soybean Production System Jayshree P. Zend, Manjusha S. Revanwar and Sandhya N. Admankar
Abstract A sample of 50 farm women involved in soybean production system was selected from five villages of Parbhani district. Pretested interview schedule was used to collect the data. The activities performed by the farm women in selected production system were listed out. Six variables were selected for characterizing drudgery of women in selected three production systems such as Physical load, Postural load, Repetitive strain load, Time load, Musculo skeletal Discomfort load, and Physiological load. Drudgery index was calculated based on total drudgery load. Drudgery index was identified as medium to high in case of soybean production system. Significant variation was observed due to factors contributing to drudgery of women labourer in soybean production system. The study revealed that drudgery of women labourers in Soybean cultivation is characterized by physiological, physical, and repetitive strain load experienced due to lack of protective aids and appropriate technologies. Result emphasized the need of designing cost-effective tools/implements, techniques based on ergonomic consideration. Keywords Drudgery index Postural load
Load factors
MSD
Physiological load
1 Introduction Agriculture is an important unorganized sector when majority of the women labour force is engaged. Farm women suffer from musculoskeletal problems that are caused by over use of muscles and significantly impair their activities of daily living [7]. Over the year’s women cultivators are typically and wrongly characterized as economically inactive and women cultivators play only a supportive role in J.P. Zend (&) M.S. Revanwar S.N. Admankar College of Home Science, VNMKV, Parbhani, Maharashtra, India e-mail: [email protected] M.S. Revanwar e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 G.G. Ray et al. (eds.), Ergonomics in Caring for People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4980-4_16
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agriculture as farmers’ wives [6]. Dash [2] stated that the Indian women, especially in the poverty group spend above 5 h per day more than the Indian man in work, including visible burden of family. As per the recent findings women in India are major producers of food in terms of value, volume, and number of hours worked. In the view of Chayal and Dhaka [1] the farm women’s participation was maximum in cutting, picking, cleaning grains, drying of grains, storage, processing operations and major part of cleaning of field, raising nursery for seedlings, weeding, shifting production to threshing floor, winnowing and grading operations are also done by farm women. In case of leveling of field, fertilizer application they do least amount of work, where as there is no participation of farm women in ploughing of field, plant protection measures and marketing activities. Marathwada region is the largest area under soybean cultivation. Most drudgery prone tas
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