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The recent coronavirus outbreak caused severe impact on the life of people. Despite of several health and economic losses, COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdown proved to be a boon for the environment. This review highlights the positive impact of COVID-19 induced lockdown on the environment; enumerating its effect on air quality indices, water quality indices, wildlife and noise pollution, therefore, focussing on the brighter side of the effects of lockdown. Notably, in India, rivers like Ganga and Yamuna showed a drastic reduction in water pollutant levels. For the first time in a generation, the Himalayas were visible from various parts of India. The amount of waste generated also showed a decline during the lockdown, and wildlife was seen blooming. During the lockdown period temperature levels were also recorded low as compared to 2019 between March to June. Hence, this review emphasizes the beneficial impacts of lockdown on different pollution parameters as well as wildlife in India.

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Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. ciceris (FOC), an extremely destructive pathogen, infects chickpea plants leading to over 100% losses. Although using chemicals like Carbendazim and Mancozeb control the disease but ruin the soil’s natural flora and fauna. Also, the emergence of new FOC races threatens the current genotypes. Many efforts have been made towards improving chickpea genotypes through breeding and selection, but the situation has not been improved over the last 2 decades. The current research uses pot screening and molecular-based approaches to screen out the resistant chickpea cultivars. In that view, the present research uses 16 chickpea genotypes collected from diverse agro-climatic areas and checked against FOC race-3. After the pot screening and ANOVA (P<0.001), the genotypes were categorized as highly Resistant (C 235, HC 1), resistant (GNG 2477, PHULeG 0517, GNG 2171, HC 7, PHULe G 0127), susceptible (ICCV 10) and highly susceptible (PUSA 547, RSG 931, RSG 888, ICCV 512, CSJ 513, ICCV 6). In Marker-assisted selection (MAS), the DNA of genotypes was subjected to PCR with STMS markers TA-96 and TA-27. The results revealed that the genotypes ICCV 512, C 235, GNG 2171, ICCV 10, HC 7, PHULe G 0127 and HC 1 were resistant. These results are significant for selecting resistant genotypes and can be utilized in the future validation and development of more wilt-resistant chickpea genotypes. Our results based on pot-screening and molecular-based datasets suggested a more reliable identification system for screening of FOC resistance cultivar inhibiting, which can help narrow down the selection.