Surinder Sud: Great new aroma

FARM VIEW

IARI's latest basmati variety, when cooked, is nearly an inch long and commands a $100 per tonne premium.

Basmati growers are in for a windfall thanks to the metamorphosis of grain attributes and productivity of this premium aromatic rice. Farmers have managed to more than double, or even triple, their earnings by growing the new basmati-type varieties evolved by the New Delhi-based Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), better known as the Pusa Institute. Apart from substantially higher yield, these varieties have grains of exceptionally good quality to command better prices in the domestic and export markets.

One of the new varieties, Pusa 1121 or Pusa Sugandh 4, has entered the Limca Book of World Records for the extraordinary length of its cooked grains, between 20 and 25 mm or almost one inch. As such, the rice of this variety carries a price premium of nearly $100 a tonne in the international market, ensuring good returns to both growers and exporters.

Significantly, the IARI scientists are now ready to come out with even better varieties of aromatic rice. These include Improved Pusa Basmati 1 (Pusa 1460), released for cultivation early this year, and a further enhanced version of Pusa 1121 (Pusa 1401), which is likely to be released next year for commercial cultivation. The IARI's aromatic hybrid rice, Pusa RH 10, the world's first such hybrid, is already being cultivated extensively, enabling the farmers to earn around Rs 1,35,000 a hectare, against only around Rs 50,000 a hectare from traditional basmati.

According to Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) deputy director-general (crop sciences) P L Gautam, research on basmati improvement has been intensified in view of the growing export market for fine grain aromatic rice. Several research institutes of the ICAR, as also the state agricultural universities, are engaged in this pursuit.

The traditional basmati suffers from several downsides that deter farmers from expanding basmati cultivation. Its plants are tall, low-yielding and prone to falling down (lodging) and succumbing to diseases and pests. Besides, its growing period is too long to fit into multiple cropping sequences. The new varieties, evolved through conventional and molecular breeding, seek to overcome most of these disabilities.

The IARI basmati breeders have managed to reduce the growing period to just around 115 to 135 days, against 160 days of the traditional basmati, allowing the raising of an additional crop in the same field. Besides, the yield potential has been nearly tripled, from around two-and-a-half tonnes a hectare of the earlier good basmati varieties to between six and eight tonnes of the new types. It amounts, in some cases, to a whopping 80 per cent increase in the per-day crop productivity even while facilitating some saving on fertiliser, pesticides and water, IARI rice breeder A K Singh maintains.

The market preference for the grains of new varieties is evident from the price premium they attract in the global basmati bazaar. The stocks belonging to Pusa 1121, for instance, were traded early this year at $1,350 to $1,400 a tonne FOB, against $1,250 to $1,300 a tonne for traditional basmati.

Indeed, prior to the recent breakthroughs in basmati improvement, Pusa Basmati 1 was the most widely grown high-yielding aromatic rice variety. However, it often fell prey to the dreaded bacterial blight disease and also had a rather high content (15 to 20 per cent) of chalky grains which are disliked by the importers.

But now IARI scientists, in collaboration with those of the National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, located at the IARI campus, have managed to put two new genes (xa13 and Xa21) in the Pusa Basmati 1 to impart it resistance against bacterial blight disease. The resultant Improved Pusa Basmati 1 has, thus, become the first variety of its kind to have been evolved through molecular breeding. Notably, the new variety has only around 4 per cent chalky grains, which is well within the internationally acceptable limit of 9 per cent.

This has made the Improved Pusa Basmati 1 the hot favourite among the farmers though, technically, it may not qualify to be exported as basmati. This is because, under the present definition of basmati, one of the immediate parents of a new variety has to be a traditional basmati. In Improved Pusa Basmati 1, the traditional basmati is a grandparent and not an immediate parent, though in most respects, it is far superior to the conventional basmati. This issue, hopefully, will be sorted out once the definition of basmati is suitably modified.

surinder.sud@bsmail.in