Improvement of Early Maturing and Climate Resilient Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Cultivars Suitable for Multiple Environments in Bangladesh

Ensuring food security for the rapidly increasing population and changing climatic scenarios are requisites for exploiting the genetic divergence of food crops. A study was undertaken to sort out an early maturing chickpea variety for fitting easily between rice-rice cropping systems in the Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plain of Bangladesh. The trial was comprised of eight elite lines of chickpea and executed at various localities in Bangladesh from 2014- 15 to 2017-18. The result explored the chickpea genotype, BARI Chola-11 remained superior to the rest of the elite genotypes for having a short maturity period (100-106 days), and lesser days to 50% flowering (47- 55 days). The same genotype was recorded to have robust vegetative and reproductive yield attributes including plant height (49-57 cm), podsplant-1 (37-50), and optimum 100 seed weight (19.5-20.6 g). Owing to better yield attributes, BARI Chola-11 resulted in the maximum seed yield (1200-1500 kg ha-1) of chickpea and might be recommended for general adoption in the region for boosting nutritional security status through improved productivity under changing climate.