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Our Bureau

New Delhi , June 23

INDIAN Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has signed a work-plan Agreement with International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Manila, for collaboration in rice research. The major thrust area of the work-plan for the period 2005-2008 includes genetic enhancement of rice in terms of yield and quality. The main objective of the collaboration is to apply genomics and bioinformatics to discover useful genes for increasing rice productivity in India.

The agreement provides for exchanging knowledge, technologies and material and executing research programmes that are beneficial for the country's rice production. One of the major activities will be to identify constraints to large-scale adoption of hybrid rice in India and develop strategies to overcome them. The work-plan focuses on enriching rice grain with iron and zinc through fertiliser use. The project aims to enrich the rice-growing environment with iron and zinc so that the nutrition of poor rice eating populations can be improved. Another plan is to develop resilient rice varieties for drought-prone environments.

The organisations plan to work together in areas of genetic resource conservation, evaluation, gene discovery, enhancing productivity and livelihood for fragile environments. The agreement was signed by Dr Mangala Rai, DG, ICAR and D. Robert S. Zeigler, DG, IRRI here on Wednesday. More than 15,000 of about 80,000 accessions in the International Rice Genebank (IRG) are from India. These have provided vital traits to IRRI rice breeding programmes for disease and insect resistance, and salinity and submergence tolerance.

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ICAR, IRRI tie up for rice research

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