A High Yielding Prosomillet National Variety TNAU 151

A high yielding Prosomillet culture

Prosomillet (Panicum miliaceum) is also known as common millet, hog millet or white millet.It is one of the oldest grain crops and is extensively cultivated in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East, Turkey and Romania (Chandrika Thakur,1989).It is a quick growing grain crop which is highly drought-tolerant, and is esteemed accordingly for growing as an emergency crop when the season is past for the sowing of the main season food crops (Yegna Narayan Aiyer,1958) and is suitable for both tropics and sub-tropics and can be grown even at an altitude of 2700 feet (Hussain Sahib, 1997).In India, it is grown throughout the country in more than five lakh hectares with major areas being in the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa, Bihar, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.The crop is often sown with the onset of monsoon and is the first crop to be harvested in the season (Haider, 1997 andNirmalakumari et al, 2008 ).Because of high tolerance to heat and drought, this crop is preferred for extreme soil and climatic conditions.In Tamil Nadu, prosomillet is predominantly cultivated in Salem, Villupuram and Vellore districts in an area of about 1000 ha with an average productivity of 800 kg/ha.Botanically this crop is an annual grass which reaches an average height of 100 cm.The inflorescence is a panicle.The seeds are 2-3 mm in size, with colours ranging from cream, yellow, orange-red to brown.The crop is hardy and provides reasonable harvest even in degraded soils under unfavourable weather conditions.Nutritionally the grains are comparable or even superior to major cereals.The grain is rich in protein (12.5%) and essential amino acids.
A high yielding, short duration and drought tolerant nutritionally rich prosomillet variety is a long felt need of the dry land, hill area tribal farmers of India and so also of policy planners for contingency planning.With this objective, breeding work was initiated to develop high yielding variety to increase the production and productivity of prosomillet.

Materials and Methods
The prosomillet culture, TNAU 151 was evolved at Department of Millets, Centre for Plant Breeding and Genetics, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore.This is a selection from the cross TNAU 96 X PV 1673.Elite plants with desirable characters which contribute towards high grain yield were selected from F2 generation onwards.They were evaluated for their sustained performance and homozygosity and the culture TNAU 151 was identified as the best.Besides, the reaction of the culture against important pests and diseases was studied.

Yield performance
The station trial data of the culture TNAU 151, conducted at Millet Breeding Station, Coimbatore, from 2003 to 2008 are presented in Table 1.It recorded an average grain yield of 2862 kg/ha and straw yield of 8444 kg/ha where as the check CO 4 recorded 2054 kg/ha of grain yield and 7430 kg/ha of straw yield.The performance of the culture TNAU 151 was 39.3 and 13.6 percent superior to the check in terms of grain and fodder yields respectively.Under OFT conducted for three years in 132 locations, it registered an average grain yield of 2680  2).

Morphological characters
Prosomillet TNAU 151 is tolerant to shootfly and resistant to rust and grain smut diseases (Table 3).
The phenology and morphological description of the prosomillet variety, TNAU 151, are furnished in to a height of 92.3 cm and is highly tillering, producing six tillers on an average.The panicles are large and branched.The grains are bold and golden yellow in colour with a 1000 grain weight of 4.0 g.
Considering the superior performance of the culture TNAU 151 over the qualifying varieties ( TNAU 149 and DHPM 50-1-1) and national checks ( GPUP 21 and K1), it was released as a new national variety, by the All India Coordinated Small Millets Improvement Project in the year 2008 for large scale cultivation in India.

Table 1 . Performance of prosomillet variety TNAU 151 (2003-2008)
It was evaluated with checks at Millet Breeding Station, Coimbatore starting from 2003-2008, under On-farm trials at 132 locations and in All India Coordinated Trials during 2006 to 2008 in various parts of the country under ICAR -All