Ergonomic Problems Prevalent in Handloom Units of North East India

Handloom is the mostly widely established cottage industry of North East India (NE) that is most wide spread throughout the region. It employs a large skilled and unskilled workforce and which, in North East, mainly consists of women workers. In the present era of commercialization, handloom sector is also witnessing changes and large number, of women are adopting the weaving activity as their profession. The activity they performed previously during their leisure time, has now been transformed to 8hours job. But, in spite of the increased weaving time spent on loom, the workstation design remains unaltered. The paper reports the ergonomic issues related to weaving practices as adopted in NE, at present and tries to analyze them from the design perspective. Subjective assessment, direct observation, interview with weavers and the managing bodies were used for determining the work related issues prevailing in the present handloom sector. The study identifies four broader problem areas related to seating, treadling, flying shuttle and cloth rolling operations where design modifications are required to improve work efficiency with reduced manual efforts. Addressing the issues by looking into the ergonomic aspects in existing workstation will have direct impact on quality as well as quantity of outcome thereby, improving the productivity as well as overall occupational wellness.