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Drought has been highly prevalent around the world especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asian countries. Consistent climatic instabilities and unpredictable rainfall patterns are further worsening the situation. Rice is a C 3 staple cereal and an important food crop for the majority of the world's population and drought stress is one of the major growth retarding threats for rice that slashes down grain quality and yield. Drought deteriorates rice productivity and induces various acclimation responses that aids in stress mitigation. However, the complexity of traits associated with drought tolerance has made the understanding of drought stress-induced responses in rice a challenging process. An integrative understanding based on physiological adaptations, omics, transgenic and molecular breeding approaches successively backed up to developing drought stress-tolerant rice. The review represents a step forward to develop drought-resilient rice plants by exploiting the knowledge that collaborates with omics-based developments with integrative efforts to ensure the compilation of all the possible strategies undertaken to develop drought stresstolerant rice. | INTRODUCTIONClimatic fluctuations in recent decades have been escalating the frequency and extremity of calamities in many parts of the world. More than 83% of the detrimental effects caused by drought occur in the agricultural sector that leads to crop loss and limited productivity, affecting food supplies and livelihood of people and has emerged as the most serious famines inducing factor across the globe (FAO, 2018). Rice is one of the major cereals and its consumption comprises over 27% of total cereal utilisation with an output of 738.2 million tons globally (FAO, 2016). Rice is a paddy field crop with more water requirement for growth and thus drought stress is considered as the major inimical that hinders rice growth, productivity and yield (Mumtaz et al., 2020).Drought stress detrimentally affects rice production by deteriorating everything from seed germination to the reproductive stages

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