Nonfatal agricultural work-related injuries: A case study from Northeast India

BACKGROUND: Occupational injuries are a major problem in agriculture worldwide. In the Northeast region of India, most of the farm operations are carried out manually with hand operated tools and equipment. These tools also cause some nonfatal accidents. In the absence of reliable data on accidents in this region, injury prevention policy cannot be made OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to survey injury causing agricultural accidents occurring during 2010 to 2013 in Arunachal Pradesh of the northeast region to know their magnitude, causes and severity. PARTICIPANTS: In this study, four districts of Arunachal Pradesh namely Papum Pare, Lower Subansiri, West Siang and East Siang were chosen using purposive sampling. From each district, 15 villages were selected. In these villages, a total of 50614 agricultural workers participated and 174 and 48 injuries were found for male and female workers respectively. METHOD: A case-control study was carried out in Arunachal Pradesh. The questionnaire-based approach was used for data collection. The questionnaire contains detailed information on the demographic and injury characteristics. The Demographic information included gender, age, educational background, etc. and injury characteristics included the nature of the injury, the body part injured, and type of tools and equipment that caused the injury. RESULTS: The results showed that farm tools and equipment-related accidents were maximum i.e. 144 (60%) caused due to dao followed by 19 from spade (8%), 18 from sickle (7%) and 8 from axe (3%). The foot and legs were the most frequently injured body parts. From this study, it was also revealed that male agricultural workers are more affected as compared to their female counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: Agricultural accident incident rate (AIR) was found to be 589 per 1,00,000 workers per year. The AIR for males is 462 per 100,000 workers per year which is 3.6 times higher than female workers. The root causes of accidents are the use of traditional tools and equipment in various agricultural activities. Therefore, any ergonomic interventions in designing tools and equipment will significantly improve the occupational health and safety of workers.