Effect on intermating in early segregating population in chickpea

Various conventional methods like pedigree, bulk population, mass selection, single seed descent (SSD) and single pod descent (SPD) have been used in crop improvement programme in self pollinated crops like chickpea to handle large segregating population. But these approaches of crop improvement in chickpea(Cicer arietinum L.) do not provide any opportunity for reshuffling of genes. Hence, any unfavourable associations observed in early segregating generation like in F₂ are likely to persist through the F₁ generations. Whereas, biparental mating in early generations like F₂ help in breaking unfavourable association (Yunus and Paroda1982; Nematullah and Jha 1993). The increase in chickpea productivity through breeding efforts has not been adequate because of these traditional method following hybridization. Keeping this in view, the present investigation was planned to compute and compare the nature and magnitude of correlation among various characters in the biparental progenies and corresponding selfed generation viz. F₃.