Innovations in Varietal Development and Seed Production Technologies for Effective Value Chain Management

Vegetable crops being important source of dietary nutrients for consumers and livelihood for farmers and traders, has to play a significant role in nutritional security of ever burgeoning Indian population in future. India has made tremendous progress in vegetable production from 16.5 million (1951) to 175 million tonnes (2017), wherein availability of quality seeds of improved varieties/hybrids have played a key role. However, the pace of development of adapted varieties/hybrids in public sector has been slow. Recent developments in crop breeding such as molecular markers, doubled haploidy, speed breeding, CRISPR/Cas9, transgenic approach, early generation genomic selection etc. are important for development of varieties in reduced time and cost, besides enhancing breeding efficiency. These techniques are useful for development of parental lines and correcting major deficiency (ies) in them or a widely grown variety/hybrid by introgressing genes/QTLs for disease and insect-pest resistance. Use of wild resources through introgressiomics and pre-breeding approaches for introgression of disease resistance and cytoplamic male sterility into commercial back ground has been well exploited in most vegetable crops for facilitating development of improved resistant varieties and hybrid seed production. Use of genetic mechanisms facilitates large scale production of affordable hybrid seeds. Further, it has been established that quality seeds contribute to around 20–25% of the total crop productivity. Hence, deploying these techniques in production of quality seeds will help to provide adequate quantity of seeds at affordable prices for the benefit of farming community. Investigations have proved that use of protected structures eliminates isolation requirement, increasing presence of effective pollinators help in proper seed setting and higher seed yield, managing adequate male: female row ratio favour higher seed yield of hybrids. However, there are issues such as location mapping and demarcating crop period for seed production of different vegetable crops, development of technical expertise and skilled human resources, development of seed processing centres, extending seed village/bank concept to vegetable crops, seed enhancement techniques etc to ensure self-sufficiency in seed industry of vegetable crops so as to make quality seed availability sustainable.