Seventy five years of research and development in arid fruit crops

The green revolution has by pass the arid regions, which constitute 12 per cent country's cultivated area. Despite the introduction of many new technologies the productivity in arid region remained low might be due to very poor soil fertility, scanty moisture and uncertain climatic factors. However, these conditions greatly favour development of high quality production in number of fruits such as date palm, ber, pomegranate, citrus, aonla, bael, ker, lasoda, karonda, fig, pilu, cactus pear etc. For arid environment, the crop either having xerophytes adaptation or its varieties are resistant to biotic and abiotic stresses for sustainable production. Systematic work on arid fruit crops initiated by Indian Council of Agricultural Research on arid zone fruits (AZF) start functioning from 1987 with objective to develop fruit growing technologies for the arid regions of the country. Main work was on conservation, characterization and sustainable utilization of germplasm on traits of interest in the view to build up viable commercial cultivation in the arid region of the country to improve economic conditions, health and nutrition of the people. In arid zone, farmers are resource poor and undertake subsistence farming. Food, fodder, fuel, timber etc. are the primary requirements of the farmers. Therefore, mono cropping is highly risk prone in this area; hence to mitigate the effect of total crop risk failures, fruit based multistory cropping system has been developed with research, which is able to meet these requirements, depending upon the land and water resources. Successful fruit based models like aonla-ber-brinjal-moth bean, ber-drumstick-senna-moth bean-cumin can be profitably adopted by the farmers of arid region for better cash flow, nutritional, environmental security and sustainable livelihood. Besides, survey, collection of genetic diversity and established in field repository released improved varieties of arid fruit crops with standardized in-situ orchard establishment technique, vegetative propagation, plant canopy architecture management, integrated nutrient -water management, plant protection schedule, postharvest management and value addition etc. for arid regions on the country. Research and development work in progress on new crops and novel varieties identification, biochemical and molecular understanding of the mechanisms of adaptive behavior, micro propagation and nutraceutical compounds etc. Market focused diversification in arid fruit crops definitely will capture new opportunities in domestic as well as export markets.