Functional Clothing – A Safety Tool for Small Scale Grinding Chakki Workers of Himachal Pradesh

Processing of agriculture produce at small scale level plays a pivotal role which otherwise help in providing sustainability and livelihood security to the marginal farmers. Although now a day’s safety and protective textile have become an integral part in one or other form but workers involved in grinding work at small scale cottage industries level are mostly least concerned about the disorders and infections faced by them at work place due to ignorance, illiteracy, poverty and poor ventilation which is a basic problem in grinding chakkis. During processing dust accumulate in work place hence workers get exposed to excessive amount of flour dust. Long term continuous exposure of workers to fine dust leads to pulmonary and respiratory diseases. Following the same aspect; the status of grinding chakki workers was studied using random selection method and implementation of designed and developed functional clothing was studied at field level to confirm the protection efficacy at the working environment. All the functional wear were found suitable in all the parameters like design, easy wear and care, fabric properties, wearing time, suitability and adoption feasibility.