Understanding response of plants to drought stress is critical for developing drought tolerant genotypes with stable performance under water limiting conditions. A backcross inbred population derived in the background of a popular variety Swarna, was evaluated for yield and yield attributing traits under reproductive stage and shoot morphological traits at seedling stage under drought stress over a period of two years during 2011-2013. Selection intensity varied across seasons and years with varied level of moisture stress. Traits such as flowering (DTF), plant height (PH), spikelet fertility (SF), biomass (BM), harvest index (HI) and grain yield (GY) are drastically affected by drought across seasons. Yield reduction varied from 48.5% to 92.4% over control trials. Chlorophyll content (CC) and canopy temperature (CT) recorded higher under drought rather than control. Yield was highly associated with DTF (−0.29* to −0.76**), SF (0.32** to 0.77**), HI (0.82** to 0.97**) and CT (−0.38**). Heritability is found to be similar for grain yield under both conditions. Genotypes displaying higher SF and HI, lower CT, reduction in flowering delay and low DSI are able to produce better grain yield under drought. High yielding genotypes at reproductive stage stress also showed superior performance under stress at seedling stage. Hence, selection intensity for high yield potential under favorable conditions, drought tolerance to varied level of stress (across seasons) and screening under target population environment had the advantage of identifying stable high yielding genotypes with wider adaption suitable for drought-prone regions, which can significantly benefits the poor farmers relying on rainfed lowland rice.

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The current experiment was carried out at the Regional Agricultural Research Station (RARS) Polasa, Jagtial during rabi 2020-21, with the goals of (1) assessing the resistance of Indian mustard germplasm lines to powdery mildew disease and (2) analysing the yield and its contributing traits, days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, plant height in centimetres, primary branch number, secondary branch number, siliqua number and siliqua length in centimetres. The results of the analysis of variance showed that there were statistically significant differences between the genotypes and their characteristics. The genotypes viz., DRMR-150-35, Black gold, and RH-9304 performed best on average out of 50 different varieties for twelve different characteristics, including high seed yield per plant, high 1000-seed weight and high harvest index.Two resistant genotypes (GM-3 and Swarna Jyothi) and nine genotypes (Pusa mahak, PM-25, PM-26, PDZM-31, Pusa tarak, Pusa bahar, Ashirwad, DRMR-601, and JM-2) demonstrated considerable resistance reaction to the powdery mildew disease after being screened against the illness. We can solve the disease effect problem by utilizing these germplasm lines as donors in future breeding programme to develop powdery mildew resistant lines.

Papaya fruits Cv. Red Lady treated with ethylene of different concentrations i.e. 60, 80, 100 and 120 ppm for five minutes at different temperature conditions viz., 16, 20, 24 and 28 ºC and 95% RH ripened in ripening chamber and untreated fruits kept at ambient temperature (30-35 ºC). Then the papaya fruits were analyzed for physico-chemical changes and sensory qualities. It was found that papaya fruits exposed to ethylene gas in the ripening chamber triggered the ripening process and showed that the increasing trends in L*, a*, b* values of colour, TSS (°Brix), Weight loss (%), reducing sugars (%) and decreasing trends in firmness (N), Titratable acidity (TA) during ripening in all the treatment combinations during advancement of ripening period from second day to eighth day. It was observed that papaya fruits Cv. Red Lady ripened by ethylene of 100 ppm for 5 minutes at 24 ºC, 95% RH showed better results in respect of a high overall acceptability score of 8.63.

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