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India develops hybrid basmati rice, eyes higher forex earnings, mulls tie-up with Japan

The Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi has successfully developed the country's first hybrid basmati rice that promises to push up substantially the production of this foreign exchange earning premium rice variety.

Prof Ram Badan Singh, IARI director, said the basmati hybrid code named ''Pusa Hybrid-10,'' would give 20-25 per cent higher yield than the best yielding basmati rice. It marks a substantial improvement over the ''Pusa Basmati-1,'' the earlier high-yielding basmati rice variety from the IARI, he added.

Singh said the new hybrid on trial would be on display at the three-day IARI Farmers' Fair at the Institute's campus beginning March 18. He added that this year's fair has ''agricultural export development'' as its theme.

The IARI director expects this basmati hybrid to be formally released for general cultivation in the basmati growing tracts of northern India. It is expected to saturate in the main growing tract in the next five years, he added.

Singh said the commerce ministry has recently agreed to certify the basmati rice varieties developed by the IARI as ''authentic basmati rice'' for export.

This is after the Mysore-based Central Food Technological Research Institute endorsed that the basmati rice improved by the IARI conformed to all the special basmati rice parameters like aroma, pre-cooking length-width norms and post-cooking elongation and non-stickiness.

The IARI director said the new basmati hybrid rice marked an improvement on all the parameters of the earlier developed high-yielding varieties.

Singh said the IARI was also test cultivating rice varieties that are popular in Japan. The results, he said, confirmed that India could take up custom production of special varieties of rice for Japan if that country enters into a long-term contract for rice production and supply.

He pointed out that the consumption of major grains like wheat and rice was coming down in India as people are diversifying their daily food basket because of improvement in living standards. He added that the lesser rice demand in the country could encourage Indian rice farmers to turn to custom production for countries like Japan where the consumer tastes are different and strong.

UNI

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