Vol. 12, Issue 8 (2023)

Author(s):
Saipayan Ghosh, VK Sharma, Madhuri Arya, Sangita Sahni and SK Singh

Abstract:
Among different types of abiotic stresses including drought, salinity, low or high temperatures, and other environmental extremes, drought stress is reported to be one of the major factors responsible for substantial reduction in global chickpea yield. In order to screen out the best performing drought tolerant genotypes, 32 chickpea genotypes were evaluated in RBD at RPCAU, Pusa during 2019-20 and 2020-21. The experiment was conducted under normal and drought conditions during two consecutive years. Significant variations were observed among the genotypes under both the conditions for all morphological characters studied including number of branches, biological yield (g/plant), harvest Index (%), yield per plant (g) and number of pods per plant. Based on the estimates of drought tolerance indices, 14 genotypes were found to be highly drought tolerant, which include ICCX-161037, ICCX-161047, IVT (MH) C-22970, ICCX-161051, ICCX-161053, ICCX-161054, ICCX-161055, ICCX-161059, ICCX-161078, ICCX-161080, ICCX-161085, ICCX-161087, IVT (MH) C-22957 and ICCX-161100. The enzymatic activity of peroxidise and catalase as well as proline content was found to be higher among the drought tolerant genotypes under drought condition. The outcomes from the above investigation depict that adoption of these screened out drought-tolerant chick pea genotypes will help in enhancing the economy of the farming community.