Vol. 9, Issue 12 (2020)

Author(s):
Rajeshwari Desai, Geeta Chitagubbi, Shobha Kasar and Meghana Kelageri

Abstract:
Groundnut production involves numerous farm activities from dibbling, harvesting, decortication to value addition. The farm women play a significant role in all these activities. Majority of these activities are performed solely by women. Among these, stripping is an important post-harvest activity in which women are involved as the major labour force. It is laborious and time consuming and farm women are facing many health problems viz., body pain and blackening of palms. The experiment revealed that weeding, stripping and decortication as drudgery prone activities. Improved/motorized tools for weeding and decortications have been developed and intervened to hasten the activity. Similarly, manually operated strippers have been developed and tested to reduce the drudgery of farm women. Even then farmers are facing difficulty due to shortage of laboures and also due to high labour wages. Hence, to reduce the drudgery while performing groundnut stripping activity, All India Coordinated Research Project-Home Science-Family Resource Management component of UAS, Dharwadhas developed motorized groundnut stripper and evaluated it at the field level. Thirty non-pregnant farm women with normal health, and without any major illness or cardio-vascular problems, falling in the age range of 25-45 years were selected for the study. The results showed that the machine was safe and easy to operate. It also proved the excellence in work output with an average stripping rate of 50 kg per hour as compared with other models and traditional method of hand stripping (10.50 kg/hour). The farm women perceived using groundnut stripping machine made the work simple and light. They also experienced less drudgery as compared to traditional hand stripping. Hence, such small improved and mechanized farm tools can be promoted among small and marginal farmersto reduce the drudgery and save the labour cost.