VL Mandua 380: A medium maturing, high yielding and blast tolerant finger millet cultivar for rainfed organic agro ecology of hills

The medium duration blast tolerant finger millet variety VL Mandua 380 was developed at ICAR-Vivekananda Parvatiya Krishi Anusandhan Sansthan, Almora from the cross between GEC-440 (blast resistant core collection germplasm line) and VL 149 ((blast resistant cultivars adapted to hills) followed by a pedigree method of selection in the segregating generations. Under rainfed organic conditions, it has recorded an average grain yield of 1,877 kg/ ha, which is 34.1 and 46.9 per cent higher yield over the check varieties VL Mandua 324 (1,400 kg/ha) and PRM-1 (1278 kg/ha), respectively in SVT trial conducted over 3 years from 2014-16. It is a medium duration variety with a duration of 113-118 days. The grains are nutritious with a higher concentration of calcium (322.5 mg/100 g) and zinc (4.3 mg/100 g) in comparison to the check variety VL Mandua 324 (294.0 mg /100 g and 2.8 mg/100 g, respectively). It exhibited resistant reaction to leaf blast and moderate reaction to finger and neck blast in the multilocation trials conducted over nine locations. Based on its superior performance for grain yield, grain quality and blast tolerance VL Mandua 380 was released by State Varietal Release Committee, Uttarakhand on 5th, February 2018. Subsequently, it was notified by the Central Sub-Committee on Crops Standards, Notification and Release of Varieties for Agricultural Crops vide notification number S.O.1498 (E) dated April 1, 2019. The specific area of adaptation of this variety is the rainfed organic condition of Uttarakhand hills.