Role Performance of Tribal Farmwomen in Domestic and Agricultural activities in Gujarat State

Farmwomen are the backbone 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 vital 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 their best in sowing, transplanting, weeding, manuring, harvesting, winnowing, threshing, storing, marketing and rearing livestock etc Government of India GOI (2008),. Besides this they are the manager to the household activities. They take important decisions in the home and outside the home Antoniades and Papayiannis. (2000). Scientific achievements and modernization are yet to make an impact on them. Keeping this fact 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 characteristics of the tribal farmwomen. (ii) To study the participation 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 involvement in decision making in farm management, animal husbandry and home management. Based on the study it was seen that Farmwomen's 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. Same was reported by Chauhan and Chauhan, (2009), Vijay Avinashilingam et al. (2010) and Chayal and Dhaka, (2010). 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. A similar trend was also reported by Fremont (2001). 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, Chauhan (2009) also reported the same. Farmwomen took a self-decision for decoration of house (79.17%) and selection and preparation of food (70.83%) 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 results are also in the line of Khanduri and Rawat (2004). 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 incase of occupation, type of family and age at marriage. Praveena et al (2005) have reported the same results. 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.