ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research Releases 4 New Varieties of Rice

The Indian Institute of Rice Research (IIRR) has recently released four new varieties of rice namely: DRR Dhan 53, DRR Dhan 54, DRR Dhan 55 & DRR Dhan 56 for the farmers.

The Director of ICAR-IIRR expressed that these four varieties of rice would definitely stabilize the rice production in the country. Even the finest rice grain gets affected due to bacterial disease and infections, keeping this in mind the Indian Institute of Rice Research has developed four varieties of rice that are unique in their own ways.

The scientist of ICAR have developed such varieties, which can save the rice from all types of bacteria’s, which can be cooked even when the water is limited, and are affordable. Fine grain rice varieties such as Samba Mahasuri usually gets affected by bacterial disease.  Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae is considered to be one of the most severe disease, which reduces the yield of crop. To curb this kind of infections, the scientist from ICAR developed DRR Dhan 53, which is a novel durable bacterial blight resistant high yielding fine grain rice variety. It has four major bacterial blight resistance genes, and these are Xa21+Xa38+Xa13+Xa5 introgressed through marker assisted selection.

It also has seed-to-seed maturity of about 130 to 135 days including average yield of 5.50 t/ha. It possesses medium slender type of grain with good HRR & desirable grain quality traits. 

The variety has been released for cultivation in irrigated and bacterial blight endemic areas of Telangana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Bihar.  

Due to the scarcity of water in most areas in India, DRR Dhan 54 and DRR Dhan 55 were developed for cultivation under the aerobic systems & under dry seed rice. This variety has been released mainly for water-limiting areas of Zone II –Haryana; III-Odisha, Bihar & Jharkhand; IV- Gujarat and VII-Telangana.

DRR Dhan 54 & DRR Dhan 55 have numerous pest as well as disease resistance for the major pests & diseases like: neck blast, gall midge, leaf blast and rice thrips and the moderate resistance to stem borer and plant hoppers.

The fourth variety of rice is DRR Dhan 56, which is a cross breed developed from Huang-Hua-Zhan/Phalgunan that is built under the collaborative project “Green Super Rice” for the resource- poor of Africa & Asia phase 3, between the Indian Institute of Rice Research-Hyderabad & Indian Institute of Rice Research-Philippines.

This variety of rice is resistant to false smut and leaf blast and it is moderately resistant to bacterial leaf blight and also tolerant to stem borer. DRR Dhan 56 is released for cultivation in irrigated conditions of Punjab & Haryana.