Women Farm Drudgery Tools- Comparison of Ergonomic Cost Between Conventional and Improved Methods

In this era of women empowerment, Women are essential to economic development especially in rural and agricultural economies. Rural women are extensively involved in agricultural activities along with household chores. They contribute about 60-70 per cent of the labour required for these activities thus playing a pivotal role in sustaining economy. They participate in different production and post production agricultural operations. For the last ten years various handy tools has been introduced for farm women dominated farm operations to reduce their drudgery at work. Drudgery refers to the dissatisfactory and painful experiences that constraint work performance and also affects the health and productive capacity of women. Various studies have been done on drudgery tools at farm and home but women are not fully aware about the use of these tools to avoid fatigue and to increase efficiency in work. Therefore, drudgery reduction measures should be introduced to avoid some undesirable situations happened in workplace while doing field work. Keeping in view the above field trials and demonstrations has been made under KVK Barnala to assess the efficiency of drudgery reducing tools with traditional method for farm women, which can also improve their work efficiency with minimum efforts. In the year 2017-18 front line demonstrations of four technologies i.e. ring cutter, maize sheller, cotton boll picker and fruit picker were done. The field trials were done by taking 10 farmers of the 3 adopted villages. The results (irrespective of the village) showed that regarding cotton boll picker, ring cutter, maize sheller and fruit picker all the farmers preferred to have these tools. All respondents are agreed for the benefits of improved tools as they are cheap and easily available in their local markets.