Background: The choice of parents is a very crucial step which decides the success or failure of any plant breeding programme. Using the diversity analysis, parents with high diversity can be chosen to generate high magnitude of useful variability. Therefore, the present investigation was planned to assess the genetic divergence among 100 genotypes of blackgram for identification of diverse genotypes for their utilization in breeding programme.Methods: The material for study consisted of 100 blackgram genotypes collected from different sources and were evaluated at ARS, Bidar during kharif-2018. The experimental trial was laid out in lattice design (10×10) with two replications. Observations on 12 quantitative characters. The genetic divergence was assessed by using Mahalanobis’ generalized distance (D2) and clustering of genotypes by Tocher’s method.Result: The relative contribution of each character to the total diversity was different and contribution of days to maturity was maximum (66.04%) followed by reproductive period (15.86%). The genotypes were grouped into nine clusters by Tocher’s method. The cluster pattern revealed that, cluster II was the largest with 28 genotypes followed by cluster I (26), V (19), III (11), IV (10) and VII (3) and remaining viz., VI, VIII and IX were solitary clusters. The inter-cluster distance ranged from 15.50 to 514.44 indicating high magnitude of diversity. The genotypes belonging to cluster III viz., BDU-20, BDU-3-20, BDU-68, TRCRU-22 possessed desirable traits like earliness and higher seed size and genotypes of cluster IV viz., BDU-9, BDU-10, LBG-752 possessed traits like higher reproductive period, maturity and high seed yield were identified as diverse. These genotypes could be involved in recombination breeding programme for the improvement productivity in blackgram.

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Background: The production of pulses recorded a negative growth rate due to stagnation in expansion of pulse growing area and very slow progress in the improvement of productivity of important pulses. Therefore, there is urgent need to increase the area under pulse crops by promoting them into new areas and seasons. Blackgram [Vigna mungo (L.) Hepper] is third most important pulse crop both in acreage and production in India and hence, identification of high yielding dual season (kharif and summer) stable blackgram genotypes is very crucial for horizontal expansion of crop, which in turn leading to increased production. The present study was thus envisaged to identify stable, high yielding dual season (kharif and summer) genotypes. Methods: Twenty-five blackgram genotypes were evaluated at three different locations during kharif and summer seasons to identify high yielding, stable and suitable for dual season. The data obtained from six environments was subjected to stability analysis as per Eberhart and Russell (1966).Result: Analysis of variance for stability revealed that variance due to genotypes, environment and environment + (genotype × environment) were highly significant for all the characters. The genotypes viz., TRCRU-136, BDU-20, BDU-18, AKU-15 and TRCRU-22 were found early maturing with wider adaptability to unfavourable environments. While, BDU-18 and LBG-465 were found stable in expression with high mean performance across the six environments for 100-seed weight. From the present study, six promising stable genotypes viz., BDU-17, TRCRU-22, BDU-18, TRCRU-339, TRCRU-18 and IC 436778 were identified for cultivation during kharif as well as summer seasons.