Vol. 12, Issue 7 (2023)

Indigenous rice (Oryza sativa L.) landraces are recognized as prime treasure in agriculture due to their wider phenotypic as well as genotypic variation that evolved from their wild progenitor. Such kind of diversity empowers these landraces to resist or tolerate towards extensive range of abiotic stress like moisture stress. However, such landraces often have their lower or intermediate yield potentiality due to give downward emphasizing on their cultural management practices. Their wider adaptability and stress tolerance characters can be used in combination with conventional rice germplasm for the improvement of high yielding stress tolerance rice genotypes as several locally available rice is not yet characterized or evaluated based on their phenotypic or genotypic discrepancies.

Thus, it is utmost important to collect and conserve a large number of rice landraces followed by evaluation or characterization based on their phenotypic variation in order to widen the gene pool of the cultivated rice. Bankura district is the major producer of rice that restricts only 8 to 10 high yielding varieties and few landraces. However, so many rice landraces have been cultivated in near past but due to lack of proper identification and physio-morphic characterization for improved breeding programme to develop high yielding stress tolerance cultivars, they are not properly identified, conserved and documented for future.

In this present study, an attempt has been made to characterize 30 rice landraces during 2018 and 2019 kharif seasons at College of Agriculture, BCKV (Bankura Campus), Chhatna based on their distinct characters like Plant height, time of 50% flowering, total duration for maturity, number of effective tillers per hill, flag leaf length, panicle length, test weight (1000 grain weight in g), number of seeds per panicle etc. and grain traits viz. grain length & width, grain length & width ratio, kernel (Decorticated grain) length and width, kernel length & width ratio, kernel shape, colour and aroma etc. to provide fundamental information for further evaluation and future improvement programme.