Author(s): Ragini Dubey, Ritu Gupta and Jatinderjit Kaur Gill

Abstract:
Agriculture is a labour intensive sector in which maximum percentage of women from rural areas rely for their livelihood. They are involved in multiple field activities starting from sowing till harvesting. During these activities, due to awkward work posture there is a high performing repetitive activity for long duration which can lead to musculo-skeletal problems. Because of troublesome work positions and repeating of these task there is a high chance of musculoskeletal discomforts like cumulative trauma disorder, repeated motions injury, repeated strain injury and occupational discomfort. The present study was therefore undertaken to find out the participation of wheat cultivation activities, to do the postural analysis of the most frequently performed activity and to identify the work-related musculosketal problems of these women. This study was conducted near the area of research in P.A.U on randomly selected of 10 women workers in the age group of 25-45years. One biggest problem is that during harvesting, the stalk of cereals crops became completely dry and hard, thus leading to cuts in hand/arm during harvesting. In addition to this wheat grain contain husk, which get accumulated in employee resulted in itching/ irritation in hands and other parts of the body. The results revealed that the women were mostly involved in seed treatment, sowing, harvesting and cleaning activities in wheat production, out of which wheat harvesting was the most drudgery prone. On an average, they spent 8hours on the wheat harvesting among which they worked continuously for 5 hours without any break. Musculosketal problems as reported by the respondents were severe pain in the neck and upper back (2.4) followed by shoulders, wrist, palms, finger and low back (2.3) upper arms, legs and feet (2.2) and numbness was felt in fingers (2.3) stiffness in palms (2.4) and fingers (1.9) and tingling sensation in feet.