Cardiac Fitness Status Among Male Paddy Cultivators: A Study in the Context of Emerging Increase in Ambient Temperature

Introduction

Agriculture plays a substantial part in the lives of people all over the world including India. Earlier studies reported that, upsurge in ambient temperature is not limited to agricultural output; it has a major impact on work performance, especially in agriculture (Chatterjee et al., 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). Moreover, different tasks performed by agricultural workers require extensive physical energy (Chatterjee et al., 2021). Food crop like paddy is important in India both from standpoint of food security and providing livelihood to millions of countrymen. It being an open-air occupation and to a great extent not mechanized fully in many parts, it poses a challenge to the human resources involved in it; the gravity of the situation is on rise with climate change becoming more of a reality, than possibility in future. Human resources who are exposed to excessive heat in course of their livelihood earning, especially in low- and middle-income tropical countries, are at highest risk in respect of their health and wellbeing (Kjellstrom et al., 2016; Lundgren et al., 2013). India being a tropical country is no exception to it. The impact of rise in ambient temperature is not confined to agricultural output; it has an impact on the work performance of human being associated with occupational activities (Parson, 2014) in informal sector especially those carried out in the open under the sky particularly agriculture (Venugopal et al., 2016). On the other hand, it has been reported in earlier studies that, climate change having a significant impact on the public health and a vast number of human resources earn their livelihood being associated the agriculture particularly the cultivation of food crop under the open air without the use of the state of art technology. Keeping this in view the present study has been undertaken to assess cardiac fitness status in terms of indices of physiological strain among male food crop cultivators during manual transplanting task.