Agro Morphological Diversity in Local Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Collections from Different Altitudes of Uttarakhand Hills

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a major food crop of Uttarakhand hills grown under rainfed upland as well as irrigated ecosystem in different altitudes ranging from 250 m to 2500 m above mean sea level. A huge diversity of this crop exists in this geographical region. Two hundred one hill rice collections from low (≤950 msl), mid (9511500 msl) and high (≥1501 msl) altitude of Uttarakhand were evaluated and characterized for 12 quantitative characters along with 5 checks during Kharif 2015. The result showed a considerable range of variability for phenological traits viz., days to 50% flowering (71–106 days) and days to maturity (102–130 days) as well as for other important traits and yield components viz., stem length (29-99cm), panicle length (12-26cm), kernel length (4.61–7.41mm), kernel width (1.58–3.13mm), LB ratio (1.13–3.87mm), plant height (48-121cm), grains per panicle (24–178), flag leaf length (16–29.5cm), flag leaf width (1–1.9cm) and grain yield per plant (0.04–7.07g). As per principal component analysis, first four principal components (PC) expressed 70.61% of total variation in which PCI, PCII, PCIII and PCIV accounted for 27.48, 17.90, 16.37 and 8.85% of total variation, respectively. Highly significant positive correlation was observed between PCI with panicle length (0.46), number of grains/plant (0.46), LB ratio (0.36), grain yield/plant (0.29), flag leaf width (0.18), kernel length (0.18); PC II with plant height (0.47), stem length (0.43), Kernel length (0.37), flag leaf length (0.29), grain yield/plant (0.28), number of grains per panicle (0.26), panicle length (0.21), days to maturity (0.17); PC III with kernel width (0.57), days to maturity (0.53), days to 50% fl owering (0.31), flag leaf width (0.27) and PC IV with flag leaf length (0.66), days to 50% flowering (0.55) and kernel length (0.18). The plotting of first and second principal component axes scores revealed the dispersion among the hill rice accessions and confirmed the existence of variability among these which might have arisen because of diverse agro climatic conditions and altitudinal differences.