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| Surinder Sud: Basmati bonanza | | IARI's new basmati varieties are better than Pakistani ones - this will fetch higher prices and a greater market share |
| Surinder Sud / New Delhi May 18, 2010, 00:31 IST |
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Until the 1990s, Pakistan enjoyed an edge over India in the global basmati rice market because it had superior quality of basmati to offer. But, this is no longer the case. The improved basmati varieties evolved in recent years by the New Delhi-based Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), commonly called the Pusa Institute, have far better grain quality than even the traditional basmati types and can command higher prices and help get a greater share in the international market. Moreover, these varieties have relatively higher yield and require less time and inputs to mature, which enables basmati to fit into multiple-cropping cycles.
Traditional basmati varieties were tall and thus more likely to being flattened by wind and other factors. Besides, they took as much as five to five-and-a-half months to yield a meagre 2-2.5 tonnes of grain per hectare. The new varieties, on the other hand, are of the dwarf type and are thus sturdier, and take about a month less to produce 6-8 tonnes of good-quality basmati grain per hectare. Moreover, they need less irrigation. This has improved the economics of basmati cultivation.
“Essentially, IARI scientists have managed to improve the harvest index of basmati so that it produces more grain and less other vegetative mass without sacrificing the grain quality and its aroma,” says IARI Director H S Gupta. The real challenge was to maintain and, in fact, improve the basmati’s typical grain qualities — thin, long, non-sticky grain with distinct aroma, which set basmati apart from other types of rice. This challenge has been successfully met.
To date, several improved basmati varieties have been evolved and released for cultivation in the basmati growing region, but two of them have been truly outstanding and, therefore, have tended to dominate the basmati sector. These are Pusa basmati 1, the world’s first semi-dwarf, high-yield basmati, released in 1989; and Pusa basmati 1121, released for cultivation in 2003, which holds the world record of having the lengthiest grains after cooking (up to 22 mm long).
Thanks to its better traits, Pusa basmati 1121 has not only replaced Pusa basmati 1 in many areas, but has also prompted the growers to expand area under basmati. Pusa basmati 1121 now holds a prime position in the export market, too. This, along with Pusa basmati 1, now accounts for nearly 75 per cent of the country’s total basmati exports.
Significantly, IARI rice scientists have now succeeded in further improving the yield, cooking quality and agronomical traits of Pusa basmati 1121, and have come out with a new variety named Pusa basmati 6 (or Pusa 1401). Some of the limitations of Pusa 1121, such as a slight bend in the grains with tapering ends and presence of chalky (whitish) grain which are deemed undesirable in export consignments, have been rectified in the new variety and the aroma has been enriched further. Thus, Pusa 1401 has uniform grain shape, better aroma and negligible number (less than 4 per cent) of chalky grain. Pusa scientists as well as the rice trade see great promise in this variety in both domestic and export markets.
IARI’s other significant achievements in basmati breeding include a gene-altered, though not transgenic, variety of basmati called Pusa 1460; the world’s first superfine-grain, aromatic (though, technically, not true basmati) rice hybrid Pusa RH-10; and a series of other basmati-like scented rice varieties, released under the brand name of Pusa Sugandh, instead of Pusa basmati.
Pusa 1460, the first biotech rice to reach the farmers, has been crafted through a technique called “marker-assisted pyramiding” of genes, involving the genes xa13 and xa21. This has given the plants immunity against rice’s most common and dreaded disease — the bacterial blight — which takes a heavy toll on yield every year.
Though China is the world leader in hybrid rice technology, its hybrids generally have coarse grain. Pusa rice hybrid RH-10, on the other hand, has superfine and scented grain. It has caught the fancy of the farmers because its crop matures around 20 days earlier than that of Pusa basmati 1 and gives 40 per cent higher yield. Thus, the per-day productivity of this aromatic hybrid works out to about 76 per cent higher than that of Pusa basmati 1. It was grown in an area of about 4 lakh hectares in kharif 2009. IARI has now roped in 18 private seed companies to produce seeds of this hybrid to facilitate expansion of the area under this remarkable aromatic rice. With this, a major revolution in the aromatic rice sector seems on the cards.
surinder.sud@gmail.com
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