Vol. 11, Special Issue 6 (2022)

Author(s):
Hebbal Swati and Renuka Salunke

Abstract:
Indian women play a very important role in all the aspects, and became life line of family, back bone of society, and pioneer of all the civilization. In India, about 70 per cent of the people are living in rural areas pay most of their time in meeting the fundamental needs of the family and traditionally responsible to search, collect, and carrying of fuel wood regularly to full fill their fuel requirements. Fuel wood collection and carrying is one of the common manual load handling tasks performed regularly by the rural women. The present study was conducted during the year 2020-21. A total of 250 rural women involved in fuel wood collection and carrying activity were purposively selected for the study. For experimental study 30 physically rural women were selected under the study. This study was conducted to determine the physiological work load, rate of perceived exertion and musculoskeletal problems experienced by the women respondents. The same procedure was followed for both traditional and improved method and then impact was studied. The results revealed that the traditional method of carrying fuel wood was found to be heavy while with the improved method, the physiological work load and rate of perceived exertion was moderately heavy.