Tribal Farmwomen in Livelihood Dealings

Farmwomen are the vertebral column of Indian agriculture. Growing food has been an interminable saga of her life. Like other rural women, tribal farmwomen also play an important role in agriculture. Farmwomen play fundamental role within home as housewives in managing the domestic affairs and they work as co-partners in the farming profession. No field operation is beyond the reach of women. They are at them best in sowing, transplanting, weeding, manuring, harvesting, winnowing, threshing, storing, marketing and rearing livestock etc. Besides this they are the manager to the household activities. They take important decisions in the home and outside the home. Scientific achievements and modernization are yet to make an impact on them. Keeping this actuality in view the present investigation on role of tribal farmwomen in agriculture in Navsari district was undertaken with following objectives. (i) To study the socio-economic distinctiveness of the tribal farmwomen. (ii) To study the contribution of the tribal farmwomen in agriculture, animal husbandry and household activities and the relationship between selected independent variables with crop and animal husbandry practices. (iii) To study the tribal farmwomen’s attachment in decision making in farm management, animal husbandry and home management. From this study it was observed that majority of the tribal farmwomen were observed that they had middle age group were primary educated had household, farming and animal husbandry as occupation, possessed small to medium size of herd, had marginal and small size of land holding, had 2 to 5 number of children, had all the three size of family, i.e. small, medium and large, lived in nuclear type of family, married at the age of 18 years and above. Farmwomen participation in pre-sowing and sowing operations revealed that the highest respondents engaged with sowing followed by stubble collection, clode crushing, manuring and seedbed preparation. Incase of interculturing operations the participation of the farmwomen were observed the highest in weeding followed by gap filling, application of fertilizer, bird scaring, irrigation, bunding and hoeing with hand. In harvesting and post harvesting operations, the highest participation was obtained in nipping/picking and threshing followed by harvesting, winnowing, storage, making threshing yard, bagging, packing and marketing of agriculture products. In animal husbandry practices the frequency of participation of farmwomen was seen the highest in cutting and bringing a fodder followed by compost making, watering, feeding, milking to animals, cleaning of cattle shed and so on. Farmwomen took a self-decision for decoration of house (79.17 per cent) and selection and preparation of food (70.83 per cent) in case of home management. Farm management was dominated by husband decision and majority of the farm management decision was taken by their husbands, animal husbandry management was completely dominated by women’s self decision. The relationship between independent variables like age, education, herd size, land holding, family size and number of children of the respondents and their participation in crop husbandry was observed positively significant. Whereas the negative relationship was observed in case of occupation, type of family and age at marriage. The relation between independent variables of the respondents and their participation in animal husbandry was found negative for all of the independent variables except type of family only. This book also contains Decision making pattern of tribal farmwomen, Impact of various aspects of trainings and FLDs, Cooperative societies- success story, training Needs of SHGs, information necessitates of rice growers and many important information regarding tribal farmwomen in tribal dominated areas. This book is very informative foe educationists, researchers, policy makers, GOs-NGOs and extension workers as well as to all who are working in the field of extension and Grass Roots level Field Extension Mechanism.