Abstract

Chickpea is an economically important crop in India, Middle East, North Africa and Ethiopia. It is the third most important pulse crop in the world next to Phaseolus vulgaris and Pisum sativum. In India, over 70 per cent of the world’s chickpea crop is produced. In India it is cultivated in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharastra and Haryana. Many chickpea breeding programmes are focused on to increase yield and in any crop improvement programme, genetic diversity has been considered as an important factor for hybridization programme. Inclusion of diverse parents in hybridization helps in isolation of superior recombinants. Multivariate analyses have been used to measure the diversity of germplasm collections and to assess the relative contributions that various traits make to total variability in a crop collection (Sneath and Sokal, 1973). Several methods of multivariate analysis such as D2 analysis, cluster analysis, principal component analysis and metroglyph analysis have been shown to be useful in selecting genetically distant parents for hybridization. Among these methods, cluster analysis appears to be a better approach in quantitative estimation of genetic diversity. The present study aims at quantifying genetic divergence in a diverse collection of chickpea

Keywords: Chickpea, Genetic divergence, Yield