Vol. 11, Special Issue 9 (2022)

Indian agriculture is heading towards precision farming with highly mechanized farm machinery in many parts of the country. But, still few parts of the country following the traditional ways which is tedious and time-consuming. Lack of knowledge and awareness, fragmented land holdings of tribal farmers forced them to practice traditional ways. Bastar region of Chhattisgarh state is one of the area where farmers still go along with traditional method of threshing i.e. hand beating. Therefore, introduction of pedal operated thresher has been thought to supersede the problem of threshing of paddy and wheat. In this research work, the physiological responses of 20 tribal farm women of Bastar has been investigated in view of their traditional way of threshing and pedal operated thresher with paddy and wheat crops. To assess the comfort and safety, physiological parameters like HR, delta HR, OCR and EER of selected subjects have been measured with selected methods of threshing.

The average value of working heart rate of selected subjects found to be 126 bpm and 112 bpm during hand beating and pedal operated threshing operation respectively. The average value of working delta HR, working oxygen uptake and working EER are to be calculated about 47 bpm, 0.75 l/min and 11.27kJ/min during hand beating of paddy crop. Similarly, delta heart rate was also observed while manual threshing wheat i.e.127 bpm whereas 112 bpm with pedal operated thresher. The output capacity while threshing with pedal operated thresher is 40% more than the threshed by hand beating. It is also learned there is a mismatch of body dimension which is responsible for back pain and other discomfort. Hence, it is signified that pedal operated thresher is ergonomically convenient for tribal women of Bastar plateau zone of CG.