1All India Coordinated Research Project on Chickpea, Indian Institute of Pulses Research, Kanpur-208024, Uttar Pradesh, India
2Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi-110012, India
3National Research Centre on Seed Spices, Ajmer, Rajasthan, India
* E-mail: npsingh.iipr@gmail.com
Online published on 20 March, 2012.
Genetic diversity among 495 accessions of chickpea collected from different agro-ecological zones of India was assessed for several qualitative and quantitative traits. These accessions were grown in the augmented design with 3 intermittent checks ‘BG 256’, ‘K 850’ and ‘L 550’ after every fifteenth row. Wide range of variability was observed for both qualitative and quantitative traits. The number of primary branches, 100 seed weight (g) and days to maturity showed moderate to high heritability and genetic advance. This suggests that the selection based on these traits would be useful in improving the grain yield. The diversity index indicated ample genetic variation for seed yield per plant in the present set of materials. Therefore, a direct selection based on seed yield and component traits may be practiced to select better genotypes, which could be utilized for development of superior high yielding varieties.
Chickpea, Cluster analysis, Genotypic correlation, Germplasm, Phenotypic correlation, Principal component analysis
