Department of Plant Pathology, Marathwada Agricultural University, Parbhani-431402, India.
Tomato is the world's largest vegetable crop and known as protective food because of its special nutritive value. It was mainly grown in kharif and rabi seasons. Presently cultivation in summer has been initiated and becoming popular because of high prices to tomatoes though yields are low. Amongst various constraints contributing to low yields, diseases are major one. Amongst the viral diseases, tomato leaf curl disease is considered to be one of the economically important viral diseases of tomato worldwide including India. So considering the importance of this disease present investigation was undertaken. Results shown that the virus causing leaf curl in tomato has been found to cause heavy losses (97 per cent) if the infection takes place at early growth period i. e. 60 days after transplanting. The losses reduced with delay in infection. The disease has been reported to cause losses in yield ranging from 20–100 per cent depending upon the time of infection. The regression equation felled linearly with time of infection at the rate of 1.27. In other words, there would be gain of 1.27 per cent in yield for each day, if the plant escapes the virus infection.
