Surjeet Basmati 1- High yielding and salt tolerant paddy variety

Name : Surjeet Singhsurjeet-singh

District & State :  Karnal, Haryana

Category : Agricultural (General)

Award :   National

Award Function :   8th National Grassroots Innovation Awards

Award Year : 2015

Innovator Profile

Innovation Description

Salient Features

Scout: Ranjay K Singh

Surjeet Singh (62) is an innovative farmer who has developed a salt tolerant, high yielding paddy variety having long grain size through selection method.

surjeet-singh-innBackground

Surjeet Singh’s district is well known for producing high quality aromatic basmati rice. Owning about eighteen acre of land with good irrigation facilities, he has been practicing agriculture for over four decades now. He is a farmer well-known in his region for his agricultural pursuits. Surjeet wanted to complete his graduation in arts but got attracted to agriculture and dropped out. His wife and their two sons have been supporting him in agriculture. The family owns modern agricultural tools and machineries and also have a cattle herd. Behind his home, he has leased a pond for pisciculture. With the help of the government subsidy, he has also installed a bio gas plant, which produces enough gas for their daily cooking requirements.

Genesis

Surjeet Singh has been growing wheat, rice, pea, mustard, potato, gram, chilli and tomato in his agricultural land. In 2008, he sowed the paddy variety Pusa 1460 in his field but due to sheath blight disease all plants got severely affected except one. He harvested the plant separately and prepared a nursery in 2009, which was then transplanted in the main field. During harvesting he selected 225 plants based on the number of tillers, lengthy spikes and resistance to foot-rot disease (Bakanae rog), a major disease of basmati rice. The selection continued for another two years and the desirable characteristics slowly got stabled. The variety was named as Surjeet Basmati-1. He distributed the variety to ten farmers in Karnal district who appreciated it and mentioned that it performed well under saline and less fertile soil conditions.

http://nif.org.in/innovation/surjeet-basmati-1–high-yielding-and-salt-tolerant-paddy-variety/790

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