Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas.com Women constitute a major and vital work force in agriculture. Nearly 84% of all economically active women in India are engaged in agriculture and allied activities. But the irony is that, most of the agricultural equipment and tools are designed keeping in mind men"s physiological parameters which are substantially different from women"s physiological parameters. Even the tools and equipment should not only be tailor made for women while they should be

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... igned according to local conditions and demand. It is necessary to evaluate agricultural tools, equipment and technologies in gender perspective for increasing productivity and reducing the drudgery and also to promote women specific production and processing technologies in rural areas. Hence, the present research paper is focused on ascertaining the acceptability of selected drudgery reducing tools by the farm women and finding out the problems/constraints perceived by them during use of selected tools. The research study was conducted in purposively selected two talukas of Banaskantha district i.e. Dantiwada and Amirgadh taluka in Gujarat. From these talukas, six villages were selected and out of these villages, a representative sample size of one hundred twenty farm women (Twenty from each village) actually involved in groundnut and maize cultivation (60 in groundnut and 60 in maize cultivation) were selected by using simple random sampling procedure. Three women friendly drudgery reducing tools were selected to assess their acceptability namely, Improved sickle, Tubular Maize Sheller and Groundnut Decorticator (Standing Type). It was found in the study that all three tools i.e. groundnut decorticator, maize Sheller and sickle were perceived highly acceptable by high majority (91.67, 85.00 and 86.67 percent) of farm women respectively. Though few problems were also reported by farm women such as hundred percent of respondents found the problem of lifting of decorticator from front side during its operation especially when little more amount of groundnuts are filled in it for decorticating. Similarly cost of Maize Sheller was perceived high by forty eight percent of farm women. In case of improved sickle, it was found that the sickle was not appropriate for the farmwomen who worked by left hand. It is essential to popularize these tools intensively and make available in the market for more and rapid adoption. K e y w o r d s Drudgery reducing tools, Farmwomen, Groundnuts and maize field