Abstract

Though no organised survey of the diseases of the rice crop has been made on an All-India basis, and an estimate of the losses caused in the country computed with any degree of accuracy, it may be safely asserted from the experience gained in the Madras province during the last two decades, that India loses annually nearly a tenth of her potential produce from the ravages of fungus diseases. The number of diseases recorded in India are many. Some occur in a chronic form causing what would appear to be negligible losses from the individual cultivator's point of view, but which considered in the aggregate are responsible for the loss of several thousand tons of rice per year. Remedial measures for such diseases are either unknown or uneconomic. Other diseases not so negligible from the individual cultivator's point of view fall in a different category. These break out periodically in an epiphytotic form. The epidemic spreads with great rapidity from field to field over extensive areas involving several thousands of acres often causing losses ranging upto 80 per cent of the crop. It is the control of this category of diseases that holds out promise of a substantial increase in the production of rice within the country. An attempt is made in this paper to recount the salient features of the study of two major diseases of the rice crop and to outline proposals for preventing such extensive losses as are incurred by individual cultivators.

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