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Type : Other Article

Female Agricultural Labourers in Rural Punjab : Present Status and Problems

Parminder Kaur and H.K. Mavi

Abstract

The present investigation is an attempt to find out the present status and problems of female agricultural labourers in rural Punjab. The present study was conducted in the villages of three districts namely Ludhiana, Moga and Roopnagar of the Punjab state. A sample of 90 rural farm women labourers in the age group of 20-45 yrs who were involved in various agriculture operations was selected for this study. A self structured and pre-tested interview schedule was used to collect the information required to fulfill the objectives of the study. In depth interviews were conducted by the investigators and both quantitative and qualitative data was generated. Apart from interviews, field observations were also made to observe the farm activities of women. The data collected was analyzed by using simple mean frequencies and percentages. The results revealed that the participation of female labour was found to be more in the activities such as storage, manual harvesting, picking of vegetables animal dung collection and its disposal, drying and cleaning of grains and weeding. The other activities in which female labour is hired are winnowing, transplanting, threshing and raising nursery for seedlings. Low wages, drudgery prone labour, dual burden of work and family, musculo-skeletal problems are the major problems faced by women labourers. Awareness level of women regarding the drudgery reduction implements was found to be very low and use of these tools was found to be negligible. It was found that time management, shyness from male trainers, difficulty in reaching training centres, illiteracy, restrictions from home and family were the major obstacles perceived by the women for their participation in the trainings on new technologies The education level of women and the family income was found to be positively associated with their awareness level regarding the new technologies. The age and the family size were negatively associated with their awareness index.

Keyword: Female labour, Agriculture, Problem, Drudgery reduction tools

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