Gender-inclusive approach in rice farming for equity and self-reliance

Abstract

The gender-inclusive approach in rice cultivation revealed that the average labour employed in man-days for field trials of rice farming showed that the major labour intensive activities, as per decreasing importance, were transportation and harvesting, uprooting and transplantation of seedlings, field preparation, threshing, cleaning, and winnowing. Of the entire man-days of 36.58 utilized on the production and processing of half an acre of rice, women accounted for 67.03% of the total labour time, while males contributed 25.04%. Some of the technologies and implements were found to be women friendly as expressed by the adopted women farmers and those were rated by the farmwomen as varying from good to highly satisfactory.