FARMWOMEN IN ---- HARYANA RURAL AREAS

FARMWOMEN IN ---- HARYANA RURAL AREAS

Working with veil on their face, this is tragic condition for rural farm-women to work with.
Their work and leisure......

Work or toil is necessary to sustain life and leisure provides a person with a chance to relax and recover from the stress and fatigue of everyday life. It also provides a creative outlet and an important opportunity to establish and maintain social networks. Despite the utter necessities of leisure in everybody’s life it was observed in a broader study of farmwomen’s life in Haryana that for women and girl children in rural farm families in Haryana, life means work. They toil long hours in the fields, tend domestic livestock, gather fuel wood, haul water, prepare and cook food, take care of children and manage the house. Farmwomen typically work longer hours than farm men: an average of 10 hours more each week during peak crop season in Haryana (AICRP Report: 1997).yet women’s work is not included in national income accounts. If women’s work in and around the house were monetized, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reckons their collective contribution to the world economy would easily top $4 trillion a year.
An intensive survey of 900 households in rural Haryana (AICRP Report.1985) found that when both subsistence production and market production were considered, women, despite having two-thirds less cash income then men, still contributed 15 per cent amore money to the monthly household budget. In general, men spent a disproportionate amount of income from cash crops or wages of the monthly household budget; they spend on their leisure activities, while farmwomen seldom spend on their own wants and needs.
It is my personal experience that leisure experience for Haryana rural farmwomen is gendered and culturally situated. Reason behind it is that women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs where their freedom of action and choice is very limited. Again they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within their ghar (home), nohra (cattle shed), bada (a place to make cow-dung cakes) and khet (farm). It was noted that in rural farm families men spent a disproportionate amount of income from cash crops or wages on relative luxuries, including tobacco, liquor and leisure activities. While women restrict themselves to spend on their own leisure, may be by nature or by inherited norms.

How of the study….
The survey was conducted under All India Coordinated Research Project of Home –Science Discipline and financed by ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and was carried out by the research team of the Department of Family Resource Management of Home Science College, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana. The research protocol was provided by the committee for Home science in Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR).
Time use survey pattern included in the protocol does not have any social-cultural bias as the information collected refers only to how individuals, spend their time since the information is collected for all the twenty four hours and no activities is likely to be missed out, that is why we are able to extract the leisure component of rural farmwomen.
The survey has been conducted every year since 1997, and the 2000 survey was the third. Survey was carried from three geographical zones viz. zone 1 arid- zone, zone II sem- arid, and zone III dry sub-humid. Villages Shah pur and Kirtan from Hisar District (zone I) Villages Deoban and Devigarh were selected from Kaithal District (zone II); villages Mahobbatpur and Pinjokhara were selected from Ambala District (zone III). In all 900 households were selected representing the five landholding farm families (landless, small, medium and large) proportionately. For all farmwomen in the age group of 20-40 years, were selected to assess their work profile. Their leisure time activities recorded were, chatting with friends, preparation of special food items, stitching, knitting and crocheting, embroidery, dari making marketing, and kitchen gardening (activities performed by 60 percent of farm women were taken and rest of the activities such as reading, watching TV and many others were excluded due to generalization constraints), all these were listed in home activities in the protocol.

Farm women bringing fodder

Laborious farm-women true to their work!

Farm-women perform several perform various animal rearing activities..

and fodder collection is one of them>

women bringing fodder from her field, usually farmhouses with land in their possession grow green fodder for their animals, and mostly women bring the head-load of fodder after cutting it from their fields, and after bringing the fodder at their houshold premises, they cut it with chaff cutter themselves, and feed their animals.

Here the farm women (mostly from landless families bring fodder(weeds) they collect every bit of it from the fields of landlords, travelling long distances from one field to other, made bundles of it and bring it home cut it and feed their animals.

No dought its free of cost but it takes long hours and consumes lots of energy of the farm women, and costs on their health, causing fatigue and pain on their body parts.

An ergonomic cost of work on bringing fodder when calculated it was very heavy on the scale.

Mother Earth by Henry Van Dyke

Mother Earth by Henry Van Dyke

To day's Quote

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

------Albert Einstein

The laborious farm activity for women

WEEDING....

is the hardest activity for farm woman in India, it consumes lots of energy on farm...

see the ergonomic results..

LEISURE AMONG FARM WOMEN OF HARYANA

Research was done using protocol provided by the ICAR.

Many women don't know they have problem. If your grandmother got up and put a pebble in her shoe every day, and your mother did the same thing, you're going to put the pebble in your shoe too, and not think about complaining.

Leisure being a necessary part of life in every human being- as it provides a chance to relax and recover from the stress and fatigue of everyday life. Rural farmwomen of Haryana have their own ways of enjoying leisure and recreation despite the scarce means, hard work, and everyday struggle involved in a subsistence-oriented life style. They have an amazing capacity to turn some of their routine work into avenues of recreation, and thereby, transform some of the most mundane and dry work into rewarding leisure experience.

Farm women have developed the skill to carve out pleasure from their meetings during everyday work, chatting with friends and relatives during their social visits and festivals, visit to market after sale of crops, their food preparation and their handicrafts. Farmwomen’s leisure activities mainly are: Embroidery, knitting, sewing, crocheting, dari making, kitchen gardening and preparation of special food item for their families.

This article has attempted to show that women of the farm families of Haryana, enjoy recreation and leisure in their own unique way as they they don’t know they have problem with lot of work and no formal leisure and recreation means. It is significant to note that they found some ways of stealing away from the mental sense of obligation and pressure generated by their cumbersome daily work performed in a largely hostile and disadvantageous environment, and of creating their own mental worlds of joy within their daily struggle.

Realty- that prevails

Women are the architect of society-let them drudgery free.

----bimla.

farm-women weeding

The Realty....

It is stunning to note in a study, near about 70 percent of farmwomen of Haryana belongs to the landless and small land holding category, work for 13-18 hours a day, the bulk of which for majority of them is on subsistence activities and housework. Besides their most of the work in the home, farm and animal husbandry domain is drudgery prone. When we disaggregate women's activities in home, we find that the largest and most invariant category relates to food preparation. In all cases women spend at least two hours a day preparing food for themselves and their families. At farm, farmwomen see weeding as their hardest and most time-consuming task, it was found most tiring and tedious job because it required, bending and concentration in order to do the job properly and thus caused backache. Again weeding took up more days in the field, then any other farm operation. Minimum estimate of the days spent weeding were 60, this figure increased as much as120 because of the areas of two cropping seasons. For some crops weeding was found as never-ending task, in cotton, particularly, one might have to go through the fields as many as four times. In animal husbandry domain bringing fodder was found their hardest job. Farmwomen have to walk a considerable distance to collect weeds/grass for fodder from the fields, which steals their lot of time and energy.