Agriculture plays a vital role in the development of any economy in rural India where the women contributions are very significant. Women are always involved in various stages of agricultural operations, such as, crop production including the sowing and transplanting of paddy, weeding manually as intercultural operations, harvesting followed by the threshing, winnowing and other post-harvest activities, cultivation of horticultural crops, tea planting, agro forestry and fish farming, etc. With time, the technological development in the sectors of agriculture brings out a significant change both in technology adoption and labour employments in terms of the rural women employability. As most of the rural women are engaged major part of their time either in their domestic activities or in the management of livestock, poultry, sericulture, aquaculture, dairy, apiculture and other agri-allied activities. However, they are not being rewarded at par with their male counterparts in terms of economic benefits. Due to these reasons, the productive activities done by the women went unnoticed or unrecorded in most of the cases, though they are contributing economically inn one way or the other. In a patriarchal society of state like Assam, the roles of women in agriculture and agri-allied are undervalued and under estimated. In a country like India with multilingual states, the involvement of workforce in agriculture varies from region to region, and the participation of the women is almost the same throughout the country. But, some regions had a different scenario, where the involvement of women is based on the caste system, classes and socio-economic status of the families. The development of improved agricultural tools by considering the ergonomical factors, modernization and digitalization provides the women with better income source and earning opportunities in the unexplored sectors, displacing them from their age old traditional roles in the rural community.
Agriculture, agri-allied, ergonomics, modernization, digitalization
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AICRP on Ergonomics and safety in agriculture, Annual report (2018-19). ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal.
ICAR-CIWA (Central Institute for Women in Agriculture), Bhubaneshwar, Odisha
https://icar-ciwa.org.in/
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