Work - Related Musculoskeletal Disorder among Farm Women

Women have contributed actively towards national development but still their role generally goes unrecognized and undervalued. Women from rural and low income households are pushed to do strenuous work. Their hours of work are unrecognized and unpaid. The daily work schedule of farm women is very demanding and arduous. It is estimated that during peak period women work every day for about 8-9 hours in agriculture and 4 hours in household activities. Farm women adopt long static postures when they perform different activities such as sowing, transplanting, weeding, inter culture harvesting, threshing, and post-harvest operations like, shelling, cleaning, grading, fuel and fodder collection etc. They do the work which is very laborious and involve repetitive actions. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to find out the work- related musculoskeletal disorders related to pain and discomfort such as back pain, shoulder and arm pain, disorders of wrist, back and lower extremities. This is mainly due to lack of awareness of the basic principles, poor working conditions and reluctance to change existing and traditional work methods and tools. The study was conducted to find the health risks factors of women to gather information about their perceived health risk in Jawahar Nagar village in Udham Singh Nagar district of Uttarakhand. A descriptive cum experimental research was chosen purposively with the sample size of 200 farm women. The data was collected through personal interview technique. A major fraction of the population was in the age group 25- 40 years and literacy was found to be low in this study. Monthly family income from all the sources was found to be Rs.7, 500 to Rs.10, 000. The results showed that most common activities performed by farm women were carrying load, collection of fuel/fodder, harvesting, transplanting, sowing and weeding etc for more than 8 hours a day. The most commonly affected regions among the farm women are shoulders, ankles/feet, wrist/ hands, elbows, knees, upper back, lower back for the last 12 months. It was concluded that ergonomically designed hand tool along with improved work may enhance the work efficiency and comfort of farm women, it may reduce the occurrence of musculoskeletal disorder problem and postural stress of farm women.