Drudgery of women in paddy cultivation
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Date
2015
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Publisher
CCSHAU
Abstract
Women play a significant and crucial role in agricultural development and allied fields. It is
most unfortunate that the role of women in agriculture has not yet been highlighted in India. They still
remain as invisible workers. It has been observed that more than 75 percent women are involved in
activities like winnowing, weeding, grading, threshing and cleaning of field farm operations. The
physical strain of female farmers seems to be too high because of heavy work tasks of various activities
done by them in agriculture and allied field. The study entitled, “Drudgery of Women in Paddy
Cultivation” was conducted by covering Kurukshetra district, study sample was 120 couples of various
socio-economic status involved in paddy cultivation operations.
Findings of the study revealed that majority of the decisions related to farm were taken by
husbands only, decisions related to home were taken jointly by both husband and wife. Majority of the
decision related to religious ritual were taken jointly by both husband and wife and majority of the
decisions related to finance were taken by husband only.
The knowledge of the respondents regarding modern paddy cultivation operation was low in
Ladwa Block. The study revealed that the average workload of men and women of low socio-economic
strata were higher than those of medium and high socio-economic strata, in most of the operations. It
may therefore, be inferred that landless women and men performed more work in paddy cultivation
than the women and men of medium and high socio-economic strata. On an average, women devote
more time in household activities irrespective of their socio-economic strata. Four operations viz;
transplanting, uprooting of seedlings, threshing and harvesting are such which are performed by men
and women both. The heavy pre-occupations in these four operations of paddy cultivation have resulted
in much higher contribution of labour by women than men. Most drudgery prone tasks or operations
are performed by women. The results although appear to lend support that most drudgery ridden tasks
are assigned to women because of the male dominated social order.
The total drudgery taken up by women was almost equal to men. Thus, it may be inferred that
women more drudgery prone operation are performed almost equally by women.
Profile of the respondents indicate that different socio-economic variables like age, caste,
education, occupation, land holding showed significant relationship with involvement pattern and
drudgery of the respondents.
Description
Keywords
Productivity, Rice, Crops, Land resources, Biological phenomena, Marketing, area, Economics, Production technology, sowing