Vol. 12, Issue 5 (2023)

Author(s):
Neena Vyas, Aruna Rana and Madhu Dadwal

Abstract:
Women play a major role in shaping the economy of the country in rural India. Himachal Pradesh is a small hill state of India in north western Himalaya, where agriculture is the mainstay of population due to low level of industrialization. It is due to small landholdings and men’s migration for more lucrative jobs leaving all responsibilities including agriculture on women. Women are normally employed in those operations which are either not mechanized or are least mechanized and these operations involve lot of drudgery. The farm women perform almost each and every agriculture activity right from land preparation, sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting and till the post-harvest handling. In vegetable farming women provides the major share of labour for land preparation, weeding and harvesting. The present study was undertaken with the objectives to prepare a drudgery scale of vegetable cultivation and to determine the health status of farm women involved in vegetable cultivation through body mass index (BMI). Weeding was found to be the most drudgery prone activity with maximum physical fatigue with score value of 2.2. Further, mean Rapid Entire Body Assessment score (REBA score - 9.13) also revealed that there was a high risk in the working posture which led to physical fatigue and musculo-skeletal disorders. The average heart rate during all the farming operations i.e. land preparation, weeding activity and harvesting was same and was 107.54 b/min. Thus, knowledge and awareness generation regarding the available tools and technologies among farm worker would be of great help to reduce drudgery and augment productivity.