Contribution of female labour in family income in northern hills of Chhattisgarh

Abstract

Women spend a substantial part of their time not only in various activities directly related to agriculture but also in the management of livestock, poultry, etc. Women are engaged in sowing, transplanting, and irrigation, hand weeding, harvesting and post-harvest activities. While they perform more than 90% of transplanting and harvesting, they do not participate at all in ploughing, spraying insecticides and other pesticides, using tractors and power tillers, or purchasing inputs. For this study a total of 150 households were randomly selected using snowball sampling technique method. The selected respondents were interviewed personally using pre-tested well-structured interview schedule. The finding showed that an average household of the sample earns Rs 32407.59 per annum from agriculture followed by Rs 11070.71 from NREGA. In vegetable production female labour percentage contribution is highest i.e. 67.77% in family income followed by poultry i.e. 58.34%. Overall, percentage contribution of female labour in family income is 42.36 %.