Pre Event Description :
Vegetables play a major role in Indian agriculture by
providing food, nutritional and economic security. More
importantly, vegetables produce higher returns per unit area and
time. Our demand of vegetables will be 225 million tonnes by 2020
and 350 million tonnes by 2030. The major challenge is to develop
technologies that enhance quality and productivity of vegetables
under reducing land, declining natural resources and increasing
biotic and abiotic stresses. Breeding of high yielding nutrition rich
varieties and hybrids of various vegetables can reduce this
increasing gap in view of the dwindling land resources. Breeding of
insect pest, disease and drought resistant varieties will help in
enhancing the crop yields, lowering the production cost and
chemical use in vegetables. Therefore, the proposed topic “New
Innovations in Improvement of Vegetable Crops” is highly
relevant for helping the scientific community in enriching their
knowledge for development of new varieties through breeding and
better production techniques in vegetable crops. During the training
programme, various aspects of vegetable breeding including
development of high yielding varieties resistant to biotic and abiotic
stresses with high nutraceutical properties using conventional and
new breeding biotechnological tools like molecular assisted
selection, tissue culture, double haploidy etc. along with latest know
how on production aspects will be taken up.