Name : M. Lingamadaiah
District & State : Bangalore, Karnataka
Category : Plant varieties
Award : National
Award Function : 2nd National Grassroots Innovation Awards
Award Year : 2002
Innovation Description
Shri Lingamadaiah (61 years), has a BA, LLB degree. He lives with his wife and two sons. His wife works in a nearby factory. He served 16 years in the army as a clerk and worked in Bharat Petroleum factory for some time till he took voluntary retirement. He purchased 16 acres of land, which he has been cultivating since 1983. He is growing mango, banana, sapota and forest tree species in his land. Besides this, he is having collection of several paddy varieties and in the recent years, he has completely devoted his life for development of new paddy varieties. Shri Lingamadaiah and his variety `Mysore Malligae’ are very well known in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and parts of Andhra Pradesh. He was honored with Beeja Mitra award from GREEN foundation. He was Vice Chairman of Village Panchayath, Former President of Local Co-operative Bank, and Director of Taluk Agril. Produce Marketing Committee. The story of his selecting this variety is very interesting. Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha had organized an International Seeds seminar in 1994, which was attended by many farmers. During this seminar many farmers from various countries had participated and there was free mutual exchange of seeds between the farmers. Shri Lingamadaiah got 10 g of seeds of a unique paddy variety from a Philippines farmer. The farmer had advised him to grow this seeds in organic manner. Hence a new field was prepared for this purpose. He put all the 10 g seeds in the field from which only twelve seeds germinated. He planted one seedling/hill and in fifteen days each seedling got about 6-8 tillers. These were again removed and replanted in more spots that grew up well and started giving panicles. The uniformly grown panicles were selected and replanted the next year. Next year he got 30 kg of selected seeds by this method. In the mean time, he converted one acre of his field into organic field and planted this variety in this field. He used farmyard manure, green manure and tank silt in the field. By using this method, there was no incidence of disease and pest in this crop. As people came to know about this variety, the demand of this variety increased and people around this region started using this variety. When people used this variety with pesticides, the crop did not do well. The innovator advised them to use less pesticide and the advice worked. This is a variety developed through systematic recurrent selection by the innovator. It is an early bearing variety with a yield of about 36 quintals per acre (9000kg/ha). The innovator was facing pest and disease problem in paddy for many years and also getting low milling recovery. He started multiplying the new paddy variety by selection procedure to get pest and disease free variety with more milling recovery. It yields more even without any extra input and is of short duration, resistant to lodging and milling recovery is about 80 percent. If grown organically, hardly any pest and disease attack is observed. He is growing this variety since 1994. It has covered 25-30% of paddy growing area in the region.
http://nif.org.in/innovation/Mysore_-Mallige_A-_unique_-paddy_-variety/203