Awareness about Drudgery Reducing Technologies for Farm Women

Women in agriculture mainly use the old and traditional tools and implements. These tools are not gender friendly also has less efficiency. Most of the work performed by these tools are tedious and time consuming. Many operations are done in varying posture. Thus use of these tools for long time causes the body pain and inconvenience. In agriculture area mostly task performed by the women are generally repetitive, monotonous and arduous. Agriculture activities like sowing, transplanting, irrigation, weeding, fertilizer application, plant protection and harvesting have immense drudgery impact on farm women. For farm activities like threshing, winnowing and milling now machines are available but in some areas mainly in hilly areas these activities is carried out manually by the farm women. So these activities are also reason for drudgery.
               
In  India  most  of  the  farm  women  are  either  unaware  or have little knowledge about  the  technology  advancement. The information is not available to them. Gender friendly tools are available in different areas like agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry. Main motive of using  gender  friendly  or  women  friendly  tools  is  to  reduce  the  drudgery,  save  time, increase the productivity, improve the work efficiency or farm women can get leisure time, conserving energy, can improve quality of work. In this reference these study was planned to assess the awareness of farm women regarding drudgery reducing technologies.

The present study was conducted in Narmada district of Gujarat. In Narmada district Dediapada taluka was   purposively selected  form  the  operational villages  of KVK,  Purposive  sampling  procedure  was  used  to select the area and simple random sampling was used to select  the sample. A sample size of 5 SHG (50) was selected for the collection of descriptive data. An interview schedule was used to gather information related to research from the respondents. The collected data was tabulated and analyzed with the help of descriptive technique (frequency, percentage).

A total of 10 front line demonstrations and 7 method demonstrations were conducted in the village and nearly 250-number of farm women were participated in the program. Initially, survey was conducted to test their knowledge about the use of drudgery reducing technologies. Based on information of their level of understanding, they were explained about the salient features of technologies, cost, benefits and impact.
 
Table 1 revealed that fifty six per cent of farm women belonged to the age group of 21-40 years whereas only four per cent belonged to the age group of below 20 years. Thirty four per cent of the farm women were in between 41-60 years and six per cent were above 60 years old. The random selection of farm women was based on-partial or complete involvement in agricultural operations and also willingness to participate in the front line demonstrations training programmes.
 

       
It was found from Table 2 that thirty per cent of farm women were having below 10 years of work experience followed by 40 per cent were having 11-20 years of work experience, 10 per cent were having 21-30 years of work experience, 12 per cent were having 31-40 years of work experience. This implies that all the farm women of the study were involved in farming activities either for full time or part time.
 

       
Table 3 depicted that When pre-evaluation was done with different technologies 90 per cent of the farm women knew about serrated sickle and  80%  knew about twin wheel hoe, similar awareness were recorded for Rack and stalk puller (86%), After the Front line demonstration s training Programmes and method demonstration were done  for  post evaluation to which  highest percent of farm women were knew about, Twin wheel hoe, serrated sickle and Rack. More than 50% farmwomen had come to know about the drudgery reducing tools in post evaluation viz; milking stand and stool, paddy thresher, vegetable collection bag and stalk puller respectively.
 

       
During conduction of front line demonstration, The sample of the study has distributed the tools from the KVK   for using in their fields.  Table 4 showed that Paddy thresher got rank I for paddy threshing because manual threshing is very tedious job. Sickle (II) and Twin wheel hoe (III) were used in vegetable and floriculture crops i.e. palak, okra, chilli, tomato, as they are widely grown in this area. Rack is used for collection of weeds, drying of paddy etc. Stalk puller was used for uprooting of cotton and pigeon pea stalk because cotton, pigeon pea and paddy are the main crops of this area. Vegetable collection bag is more suitable for collection of kitchen garden vegetables. Milking stand and stool was used for milking, by they save time and used both hand for milking. On the whole the sample of the present study have used the technologies either in to or partially in their fields depending on the crops cultivated.
 
 

From the study, it was showed that women were involved in various agricultural operations which were carried out by traditional methods. However they have heard about few of the improved tools but not used it due to lack of accessibility. Moreover they were not aware of how to use the improved technologies. Through intervention of these technologies and method demonstration at their fields. Awareness levels were increased and started using them in their fields when they were accessible to them in their village. Findings of Singh et al., (2019) also supported the study on women friendly improved farm tools and implements for reducing drudgery in farm operations. Benchmark study was conducted in Madhya Pradesh regarding involvement of farm women in agriculture and allied activities. Findings of the study revealed that the adoption level of improved farm tools and equipment had increased efficiency and reduced drudgery with 4.78 per cent which was quite low reported by Singh (2009).

It can be concluded that awareness among the farmers can be increased by conducting front line demonstrations, where we can introduce/ educate/train in using the technologies. If they are aware and implements are accessible, they were able to adopt the improved tools as per their crop needs and reduce their drudgery. However there is a need to supply these technologies at their door step to utilize them as every farmer cannot afford to purchase them.