Half decade of abiotic and biotic stress tolerance research in resource limited tribal belt of central India

The present experiment was conducted at SGCARS, Jagdalpur, IGKV, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India under natural field condition to study water stress tolerance and understand physiological, biochemical and genetic buffer mechanism to harness upland rice potential received from ICAR-IIRR, Hyderabad under All India Coordinated Rice Improvement Project; against blast and bacterial leaf blight resistance. Based on four years of field experiment in upland rice, it can be concluded that sink strength has little or nonsignificant impact of environmental fluctuation i.e. 184-278-451; 147-237-449; 179-245-336 and 201-253-335 (Kharif 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 respectively). Further, total biomass produced by genotypes in comparison with agriculturally economic portion, genotype R-1670-1134-1-115-1 showed first-rate potential viz., 2.53 and 7.19 kg/plot (grain yield and crop biomass respectively); 2.08 and 7.11 kg/plot; 2.23 and 6.89 kg/plot and 2.28 and 7.06 kg/plot in all the successive experimental seasons. Terminal drought effect was significantly observed by outward appearance of spikelet fertility in some genotypes specifically R-1695-2152-1-268-1 (91.00, 80.00, 87.00 and 86.00% respective years) and R-1677-3977-1-486-1 (91.50, 79.50, 84.00 and 85.00%). We summarize these genotypes as poor photosynthates transporter under terminal stress, or phloem transport to spikelet is susceptible. Under biotic stress based trial, the experimental yield ranged from 2.67kg/plot (Improved sambha Mahsuri) to 4.23/plot (RP-Patho-1-2-15). The Recurrent parent 01 (BPT 5204) was the earliest to flower with 50% flowering in 91 DAS followed by donor parent 01 (92 DAS) while RP-Patho-1-2-15 and RP-Patho-3-73-6 recorded to be late genotypes with 113 DAS heading span.