Agony of rural women and their empowerment through skill trainings

Abstract

Unless and until one understands the problems faced by rural women in agriculture and allied sector, the welfare policies cannot be formulated to empower them. About two third of manual labour in farming is constituted by rural women. They provide 14- 18 hours of productive physical labour everyday in agriculture, allied and domestic chores. Despite of that women are paid low wages. Also many of the operations in agriculture do not suit to women and inconvenient due to which they suffer from physical and mental fatigue, hardship, exploitation, pain, stress etc. In addition, women are also exposed to several occupational diseases while performing certain operations like spraying of insecticides, using fertilizer without sufficient safeguards causing intoxication and in some cases death. Heavy work during crop cultivation and harvesting can have a high incidence of stillbirths, premature births and death of the child or the mother. KVK’s are key source of technological empowerment of rural women. These rural women can be equipped with trainings on various aspects of foods and nutrition, child development, clothing and textile, family resource management etc. Significant gain in knowledge point out the fact that majority of the respondents were successful in acquiring knowledge at post exposure level in various garments construction and maintenance of sewing machine. If these people are empowered, the society will be empowered and agony of rural women can be addressed.