Cotton Picking Bag – Adaptability, Acceptability and Feasibility among Rural Women

Abstract

Rural women play a pivotal role in Indian agriculture. They perform key agricultural tasks in all regions of the world  ranging from hoeing to harvesting, threshing and post harvesting operations. All these activities stretch on throughout the  day due to which women work hard for longer hours in the field and at home. Life of women is therefore, full of drudgery  and they face a lots of health problems at every moment. Keeping these facts in mind new technology (cotton picking bag)  was introduced for cotton pickers to relive from drudgery as well as other health problems. The study was undertaken in  four villages namely, Dhandakheri, Dumerkhan, Dhigana and Pandu Pindara of Jind district of Haryana state. The study  was conducted on purposively selected samples of 100 rural women respondents (25 from each village) who were actively  involved in cotton picking. After getting training 73 to 89 per cent of rural women were highly skilled in drafting, cutting  and stitching of cotton picking bag. Regarding overall adoption feasibility, maximum AFI score was 93.46 per cent  followed by 88.46 per cent on attributes like practibility and cultural compatibility which indicates high adoption potential  of cotton picking bag among rural women.