PROMOTING TECHNOLOGIES FOR WOMEN IN AGRICULTURE
Women play a significant role in agricultural activities. They perform the most tedious and back-breaking tasks in agriculture, animal husbandry, and at home. The most labour demanding activities experienced by women in various farm operations are sowing, harvesting, threshing, manuring and weeding. But the available agriculture tools and implements are not particularly women-friendly as they are not designed considering women’s ergonomic requirements. In turn, women are prone to health hazards such as muscular and physiological stress due to the environment, work processes and tools with which they operate. Developing technologies that focus on improving work efficiency, reducing drudgery and occupational health hazards of rural women are the need of the hour.
Vigyan Prasar is an autonomous organization of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. It is engaged in large scale science popularization activities, generating science-based knowledge among all sectors on several relevant issues at the national level.
As part of the gender and technology communication, the programme for promoting technologies for women in agriculture was taken up by Vigyan Prasar. Based on the available agriculture implements and from women’s perspective, the programme focused on need-based technologies with important thrust areas of capacity building for –
- Improved tools and technologies for drudgery reduction as well as load-bearing activities for fetching fuel, fodder, water and energy-saving devices.
- Value addition to farm and non-farm waste
- Nutrition & health and
- Livelihood security for farm women
VIGYAN PRASAR - KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS
