Drudgery Reduction through Ergonomic Evaluation of Women Farm Workers using Local Sickle and Serrated Sickle During Harvesting in Wheat Crop of Udaipur District

M. Anusha, A. K. Mehta
2021 International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences  
Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas.com Women play a major and crucial role in doing the agricultural operations. The women workers in Udaipur district mostly uses local made sickle for doing harvesting operation. This study was conducted in 2019-20 at instructional Farm, CTAE, Udaipur with ten women farm workers during the manual harvesting operation by using local sickle along with serrated sickle. The main objective of the study was to investigate the most drudgery prone tool and to
more » ... the proper tool for doing harvesting operation in wheat crop. Use of proper tools not only reduce the drudgery but also improves the operating efficiency along with the comfort, besides improving the productivity of the women farm workers in doing the operation. In view of this, an effort has been made to assess the physical and physiological parameters of women farm workers who are using local sickle along with the serrated sickle for doing harvesting operation in wheat crop. The whole study was conducted on ten female farm workers identified from the population of workers in the age group of 18 to 45 years. During the experiment, the average working heart rate, Energy expenditure rate, Oxygen consumption rate, physiological cost of work of women farm workers using local sickle was 103.65 beats/min, 11.67 kJ/min, 0.57 l/min, 18.44 beats/m 2 and for serrated sickle 111.55 beats/min, 15.62 kJ/min, 0.62 l/min, 14.96 beats/m 2 .The overall discomfort rate at the end of the work for local and serrated sickle was 7.6 and 6.8. The reduction of drudgery by using serrated sickle over local sickle was found to be 18.87%. The rating of perceived exertion given by the female farm workers at the end of the work was found to be less for serrated sickle i.e., 3.6 and for local sickle, it was 4.2. K e y w o r d s Agricultural activities, Women farm workers, Harvesting, Ergonomic assessment
doi:10.20546/ijcmas.2021.1001.130 fatcat:ru2rg2g4kjekrj2c2jg6jdisme