A collaboration between the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and ICRISAT gave us major breakthrough in developing a drought tolerance and disease-resistant chickpea. These are two desi chickpea (Bengal chana) varities namely, ‘Pusa 10216’ and ‘MABC-WR-SA-1’. What makes this accomplishment more unusual is that both varieties were developed in half the conventional time, usually it takes anywhere between 10-11 years.
According to the scientists, Pusa 10216 showed 11.9% increase in yield over Pusa 372 during two-year multi-location testing in drought conditions. With the world’s growing population, rising demand for food makes genomics a key to aceelerated breeding. It is expected that the research may make India self-sufficient in pulse production, as the country still faces increasing production gap. Noteably, drought and climate change are said to cause more than 70 per cent of yield loss in chickpea globally and more than 90 per cent chickpea cultivation is in South Asia alone.
The scientists are of the view that this breakthrough will enable breeders to enhance the use of diverse germplasm and candidate genes in developing improved and climate-change ready varieties that will contribute significantly to the increased productivity and sustainability of agricultural development in developing countries.
A success story has come out in India, a collaboration between the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and ICRISAT gave us major breakthrough in developing a drought tolerance and disease-resistant chickpea. These are two desi chickpea (Bengal chana) varities namely, ‘Pusa 10216’ and ‘MABC-WR-SA-1’. What makes this accomplishment more unusual is that both varieties were developed in half the conventional time, usually it takes anywhere between 10-11 years.
According to the scientists, Pusa 10216 showed 11.9% increase in yield over Pusa 372 during two-year multi-location testing in drought conditions. With the world’s growing population, rising demand for food makes genomics a key to aceelerated breeding. It is expected that the research may make India self-sufficient in pulse production, as the country still faces increasing production gap. Noteably, drought and climate change are said to cause more than 70 per cent of yield loss in chickpea globally and more than 90 per cent chickpea cultivation is in South Asia alone.
The scientists are of the view that this breakthrough will enable breeders to enhance the use of diverse germplasm and candidate genes in developing improved and climate-change ready varieties that will contribute significantly to the increased productivity and sustainability of agricultural development in developing countries.
In this newsletter we have covered various news on agriculture strating from private sector’s committment towards the agri sector, Artificial intelligence, power of social media in diversifying the knowledge-base of different agri techniques, government’s intervention in crop planning, news from around the world to new researches taken place worldwide. We hope you will find the newsletter informative and a good read.
Source: Federation of Seed Industry of India ,30.9.2019
