Ergonomic risk assessment of farmers in Odisha (India)

Abstract

Agriculture has been considered as the basic source of income and livelihood for majority of Indian families. In the agricultural fields, the farmers use various types of tools and equipment to carry out their day-today activities. Ergonomically designed tools and equipment provide promising and encouraging results and hence it becomes necessary to consider the human factors in the design of farm tools to enhance the operating efficiencies, productivity, and working comforts of the farmers. In view of this, an effort has been made to assess the ergonomics involved in various postures taken by farmers in different rice farming processes like land preparation, seeding, weeding, fertilizing, pesticide spraying, harvesting, threshing, and winnowing, respectively. The postures taken by farmers during all these processes were collected by still photography considering both manual and mechanized methods, wherever applicable in Odisha (India). The Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) tool was used to assess the postures, and based on the obtained RULA scores the necessary actions were recommended accordingly. Then, SWOT analysis was done for evaluating the modified technique in farming over the existing system.