Characterization of drudgery and drudgery load in wheat production system of hill region

Abstract

Agriculture, for decades, had been associated with the production of basic food crops. Wheat is the very important food grain of India next to rice. It is grown on 13 per cent of the cropped area of India. In Uttarakhand, it is the major cereal crop of rabi season accounting for 4 per cent of the total area under cereals. Both women and men farmers from different socio-economic status of Uttarakhand, work in field for different activities during long hours to increase crop yield. Thus the present study was undertaken in hill and tarai zone of Uttarakhand. Data were collected from 30 families from five adopted villages through an interview schedule and experimental tables. Main objective of the study was to assess the crop calendar, level of gender participation, technology usage satisfaction, physical workload, intensity of strain load, musculoskeletal discomfort and physiological workload in weeding, bird watching/scaring, cutting, picking and bundling activities of wheat production system. In result, equal gender participation was observed in bird watching, cutting, picking and bundling activities, followed by women domination in weeding activity only. For performing the above activities, respondents were using the technologies such as kurpi, darati and sickle that were not designed as per the anthropometry of respondents. However, result of drudgery load showed the highest level of drudgery among the four activities e.g. weeding activity, followed by cutting, picking/ bundling and watching/ bird scaring. Among all the highest level of MSD load was observed in cutting activity, time load (12.86), physiological load (7.06), repetitive strain load (12.2) and posture load (11.46) in weeding activity, followed by the physical load in picking/bundling (6.96) activity. Thus, there is a need to alleviate such drudgery by introducing same mechanization in hill agriculture particularly in wheat production system.