Sashakt Khurpi: An Ergonomic Long-Handle Weeder for Women Farm Workers

Sashakt Khurpi is an M.Des product design graduation project that redesigns India's most-used hand weeding tool — the short-handled khurpi — into a stand-up, long-handle weeder sized for the women who actually use it. Weeding is the most drudgery-heavy field operation in smallholder farming, and it falls overwhelmingly on women, who spend whole days in deep squat or bend with a blade that was never drawn for their bodies.

The project was conducted with a women's farmer collective in the vegetable-and-paddy belt around Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. It opens with a field study — twelve farm women observed and filmed weeding their own plots, posture-scored with REBA (Rapid Entire Body Assessment), and interviewed in the fields rather than in a seminar room. Published drudgery research from the ICAR system frames the primary data. Insights converge into a measurable design brief, three concepts are generated and judged against it, and one — a T-grip long-shaft weeder with an angled, replaceable blade — is prototyped twice in a local fabrication workshop.

Validation is not a rendering: prototype 1 is tested on real plots by six of the same women, measured with NASA-TLX workload scores, Borg CR-10 effort ratings and REBA re-scoring, then refined into prototype 2. The journey closes where a graduation project must — in a process document, a jury presentation and portfolio pages that argue every decision from evidence rather than taste.

The khurpi — a short blade on a hand-length handle — is the default weeding tool across Indian smallholdings. It forces its user into deep squat or full forward flexion for six to eight hours a day during peak weeding weeks, loading the lumbar spine and knees through exactly the posture range ergonomics literature identifies as most damaging. The burden falls overwhelmingly on women, whose tools are rarely designed around their grip span, standing height, clothing or work rhythms.

Institutional improved weeders exist, but they routinely miss adoption: too heavy for continuous carry, too costly, unrepairable locally, or simply unfamiliar. What is missing is not another drawing of a weeder but a process that lets the tool grow out of the users' own field conditions — measured postures, real anthropometric ranges, local fabrication — and proves itself on their soil before anyone calls it improved.

Abstract

This graduation project redesigns the khurpi, the squat-height hand weeder used across Indian smallholdings, as a long-handle stand-up tool co-designed with women farm workers near Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. Twelve women were observed and filmed during real weeding, posture-scored with REBA, and interviewed; the insights were synthesised into a design brief covering posture, grip, height, weight, cost and local manufacturability. Three concepts were developed and evaluated; a T-grip long-shaft weeder with an angled, replaceable blade was prototyped in mild steel and timber, user-tested with NASA-TLX, Borg CR-10 and REBA measures, refined, and documented for jury through a process document and portfolio.

Introduction

In smallholder agriculture, weeding consumes more human labour than any other operation, and in much of India that labour is women's — performed in deep squat or full forward bend, six to eight hours a day during peak season, with a short-bladed khurpi that forces the spine into its worst working posture. Studies within the ICAR system, including interventions with hill farm women, have repeatedly linked traditional hand weeding to musculoskeletal strain and quantified the drudgery that improved tools can remove. Yet adoption of institutional weeder designs remains patchy: many are heavy, unfamiliar, or built without the end user's hand, height or storage reality in the room.

Existing vs proposed

• Existing practice: the khurpi demands a squatting or bent-back posture; improved weeders designed in institutions reach the field without a co-design step and often fail on weight, cost, repair or habit.
• Proposed: a research-through-design process that starts in the field, sets measurable ergonomic targets from anthropometric data rather than averages, iterates through physical prototypes tested by the same women who briefed the project, and prices manufacturability into the brief so a local fabricator — not a distant factory — can build and repair the tool.

Feasibility

• Technical: Rhino and KeyShot modelling is standard studio work; prototype fabrication (mild-steel shaft, turned timber grip, bolted blade) is within the reach of any local workshop.
• Economic: the brief set a cost ceiling agreed with the collective — comparable to a few days of seasonal weeding earnings — and the bill of materials stays in the range a village fabricator can quote.
• Operational: user testing happened on the women's own plots during the weeding window, so validation measured real work, not a laboratory pantomime.
• Ethical: informed consent (separate consent for filming), anonymised participant coding, no government ID numbers, and the collective keeps the prototype after the jury.

In scope

• One co-design engagement with a twelve-member women's farmer collective in the Guntur belt (fictionalised name; participants anonymised).
• Hand weeding in loose-to-medium soils of vegetable and paddy bunds, standing operation, single user.
• Two physical prototypes: form, ergonomics, CMF and workshop manufacturability.
• Ergonomic evaluation with REBA, NASA-TLX and Borg CR-10 on real plots.
• Process document, jury presentation and portfolio pages.

Out of scope

• Engine-powered or mechanised weeders; the brief deliberately targets the un-electrified, hand-tool economy.
• Mass production engineering (tooling drawings, tolerance stacks for factory manufacture) beyond a workshop-level bill of materials.
• Crops that demand kneeling precision work (transplanting, harvesting) — this tool claims only weeding.
• Long-term durability trials across seasons; the user tests cover one weeding window.
• A costed distribution or subsidy pathway; the project stops at a fabricator-ready design the collective can commission.

Design approach. Research-through-design mapped onto the double diamond: a wide field study, a converging synthesis, an open concept phase, then iterative prototyping with field validation as the final test of every claim.

Participants and sampling. Twelve members of the collective, purposively selected to span ages and weeding experience; six of the twelve returned as user-testers so the same bodies that defined the brief judged the prototype.

Instruments. REBA worksheets scored from video stills at fixed task points; a semi-structured interview guide in Telugu; paper NASA-TLX forms with the standard weighting procedure; the Borg CR-10 scale for perceived exertion; published anthropometric tables for Indian farm women to set grip height and diameter ranges.

Analysis. Affinity mapping clustered field notes and transcripts; REBA scores were compared between the khurpi and the prototypes; NASA-TLX workload was computed with each tester's own weightings; CR-10 medians were read against task segments.

Ethics. Written informed consent, separate consent for filming, participant codes instead of names, no ID numbers collected, and the collective's ownership of the final prototype stated up front.

A graduation project's architecture is its argument: the diagram below is the chain of evidence the jury will be invited to walk, from published knowledge to a tool that survived real work.

Project logic — from field to jury

flowchart TD
  A["Secondary research: ICAR drudgery literature + tool audit"] --> B["Field study with 12 women farm workers (Guntur belt)"]
  B --> C["Video-based REBA posture scoring of khurpi weeding"]
  B --> D["Semi-structured interviews in Telugu"]
  C --> E["Affinity mapping and insight synthesis (Figma)"]
  D --> E
  E --> F["Measurable design brief and PDS"]
  F --> G["Concept A: bent-shaft short tool"]
  F --> H["Concept B: long-handle T-grip weeder"]
  F --> I["Concept C: single-wheel hoe"]
  G --> J["Evaluation against brief: posture, weight, cost, repairability"]
  H --> J
  I --> J
  J --> K["Prototype 1: mild-steel shaft, timber grip, bolted blade"]
  K --> L["Field test with 6 women: NASA-TLX, Borg CR-10, REBA re-scoring"]
  L --> M["Prototype 2: revised grip, blade angle, shaft reinforcement"]
  M --> N["CMF strategy + renders (KeyShot)"]
  N --> O["Process document + portfolio + jury"]

Three structural commitments hold the chain together. First, the users define the targets: the brief's numbers come from the field study and published anthropometric tables, so every later decision can be traced to a stated requirement. Second, validation is physical and comparative: the khurpi baseline and the prototype are tested by the same women, on the same plots, with the same instruments, which is what turns 'it feels better' into data. Third, the loop is visible: prototype 1's failures (a grip blister hotspot, a blade angle that skidded in wet soil) are documented, not hidden, because the jury grades the process as much as the artefact.

• Commission a batch of ten through the local workshop and track durability and adoption across a full weeding season with the collective.
• Adapt the geometry for left-handed users and for paddy-specific soft-soil conditions, where a floating skid may beat a fixed blade.
• Explore a blade-exchange system with the local blacksmith so sharpening and replacement stay inside the village economy.
• Test a smaller variant sized for adolescent trainees in agricultural schools.
• Document the co-design method itself as a reusable playbook for other drudgery-heavy farm operations — transplanting, harvesting, threshing.