Journal of Horticulture
Open Access
ISSN: 2376-0354
+44-20-4587-4809
ISSN: 2376-0354
+44-20-4587-4809
Guar harvesting, besides being a tiring task, involves a number of health hazards. Pods of the guar plant become very hard after drying and prick into the hands of the worker while cutting. The field experiment was conducted on 10 women respondents in CCSHAU farms harvesting guar in the forenoon for one hour with the existing and improved method. In the existing method, the main problems faced while harvesting of guar was irritation (ms=4.0), hands smeared with dust (ms=4.0) and injury in hands (ms=3.5). To overcome the problem, an improved method was used for guar harvesting that consisted of use of safety hand gloves and improved serrated sickle. Three types of safety gloves were tested and the best gloves were further selected for ergonomic evaluation. Effect of gloves in relieving them from hazards revealed that some of the health hazards were completely removed viz cuts in hands, hands smeared with dust and swelling in hands (100%). There was 28.8 percent reduction in RPE while cutting guar using improved sickle with gloves. Improved methods resulted in a decrease in musculoskeletal problems. Maximum reduction in pain was observed in the palm with a combination of an improved sickle with gloves (40.5) followed by in fingers (35.9%). Overall discomfort score was 9.2 which reduced to 6.7 with safety gloves. And, it also increased the area covered (3.0%). Therefore, propagation of appropriate technology is the need of the hour as preventive measures which would be helpful in reducing the drudgery and increasing the efficiency.