Sorghum - icrisat

Africa, Asia and Latin America and Caribbean
countries (Annexure III); SEA (60), Asia (50) – India
(22) and others (28), WCA (50) and LA (34).
Sorghum area, production and the number of
released cultivars have increased over the years
(Figures 4–8).
The significant success of ICRISAT partnership
program, thus achieved is due to dynamic sorghum
improvement program involving multidisciplinary
team of scientists utilizing the strong genetic
resource base of 36,744 accessions from 91
countries representing all the five basic and their
hybrid races (30,853 landraces, 5434 breeding
lines, 66 advanced cultivars and 421 wild) built at
ICRISAT’s Rajendra S Paroda Genebank, which
were maintained, classified and evaluated
(Table 1). In pursuit of diversifying its breeding
products (160 pairs of high-yielding male-sterile
lines, 567 pairs of trait-specific male-sterile lines,
873 improved restorer lines and 1451 varieties),
ICRISAT successfully captured both racial as well
as geographical diversity. Nearly 4000 germplasm
accessions were utilized to generate variability of
which 557 lines have contributed to the
development of the elite lines referred above. The
tropical germplasm lines originating from Asia
(175) have contributed most followed by temperate
and tropical lines from Africa (139) and USA (105)
(Table 2). These germplasm lines largely belonged
to Durra (80) (predominantly represented by Asia)
and caudatum (48) (predominantly represented by
Africa) among the basic sorghum races and guineacaudatum
(71) (predominantly represented by
Figure 4. Sorghum area,
production, productivity and
number of cultivars released
in SEA.
Figure 5. Sorghum area,
production, productivity
and number of cultivars
released in Asia.
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