Agony of rural women and their empowerment through skill trainings

Abstract

Unless and until one understands the problems faced by rural women in agriculture\rand allied sector, the welfare policies cannot be formulated to empower them. About\rtwo third of manual labour in farming is constituted by rural women. They provide 14-\r18 hours of productive physical labour everyday in agriculture, allied and domestic\rchores. Despite of that women are paid low wages. Also many of the operations in\ragriculture do not suit to women and inconvenient due to which they suffer from\rphysical and mental fatigue, hardship, exploitation, pain, stress etc. In addition, women\rare also exposed to several occupational diseases while performing certain operations\rlike spraying of insecticides, using fertilizer without sufficient safeguards causing\rintoxication and in some cases death. Heavy work during crop cultivation and\rharvesting can have a high incidence of stillbirths, premature births and death of the\rchild or the mother. KVK’s are key source of technological empowerment of rural\rwomen. These rural women can be equipped with trainings on various aspects of\rfoods and nutrition, child development, clothing and textile, family resource\rmanagement etc. Significant gain in knowledge point out the fact that majority of the\rrespondents were successful in acquiring knowledge at post exposure level in various\rgarments construction and maintenance of sewing machine. If these people areempowered, the society will be empowered and agony of rural women can be addressed.