Assessment of physiological strain in male food crop cultivators engaged in manual threshing task in a southern district of West Bengal

Abstract

The impact of rise in ambient temperature is not confined to output; it has an impact on the work performance of human beings associated with occupational activities in informal sector, especially those carried out in the open field under the sky. The agricultural workers are constrained to work manually all through the day irrespective of disparity in working situation existing in the working environment. Hence, there is an urgent need to study the cardiac performance status in terms of indicators of physiological strain of the human resources. In this backdrop, the present study has been undertaken to assess the degree of physiological strain in male food crop cultivators’ (age range 24 - 36 years) engaged in manual threshing (separating the grains from the rice straw by manually - by hand i.e. beating method) during paddy cultivation time. Moreover the magnitude of physiological strain was significantly higher (P < 0.5) during “Boro” type of paddy cultivating time. The result of the study indicated that human resources are indeed subjected to strains, albeit to different degree, as adjudged by the indicators of physiological strain.

Keywords

• agriculture
• wet bulb globe temperature (wbgt)
• heart rate
• cardiovascular strain
• workload