Genetic Improvement of Rice for Inland Saline and Alkaline Areas of North-Western India

Rice is one of the leading crops in salt affected region and being affected by several stresses such as salinity and sodicity during crop growth stages is reducing economic yield. Rice sensitive to salt stress at two stages namely seedling and reproductive stage. However, genetic variation is more in rice for salt stress hence, we can identify the new donor and lines to enhance the salt tolerance at both the stages. We identified 241 tolerant lines among 7502 rice lines tested at seedling stage. We developed many mapping populations for salt tolerance at reproductive stage are being used for identification of QTLs. We pyramided the Saltol (Seedling stage) and qSSIFSH8 (spikelet fertility) QTLs into high yielding varieties namely, Pusa44, PR114 and Sarjoo52. We developed 13 salt tolerant rice varieties and distributed to private companies, farmers and etc. We produced 1056 quintals and 3126 quintals of breeder and truthfully labelled seeds of salt tolerant rice varieties during last 22 years (2000–2021). These salt tolerant rice varieties covered area of app. 1.02 m ha covered every year. Another major notable impact of using salt tolerant rice varieties is bringing back the unproductive barren or salt affected lands into the fold of productive normal lands. Therefore, faster conversion of degraded lands into normal ones with the use of resilient varieties can ensure more area and thus increased food productivity from these reclaimed lands.