ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Quantitative Evaluation of Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Under High Temperature Stress

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is world’s second highest produced grain crop after maize. It is India’s preeminent staple crop among other cereal crops. It is a major source of food after wheat. However, it is highly sensitive towards high temperature during flowering and early grain filling stages hence, threaten crop productivity. The various anthropogenic activities increase the global temperature at an alarming rate which causes negative impact on agriculture in terms of reduction in growth and yield. With increasing population and changes in global climate, the current rice production will be inadequate to meet the future demand very soon. Therefore, use of temperature resistant variety can be a better alternative. The experiment was carried out with thirty two genotypes of rice to evaluate genotype for growth and yield attributing traits under high temperature conditions. The genotypes under investigation were observed at flowering and maturity stage after the treatment of high temperature. Among all the genotypes, IET 23947, Luit and IR-82310-B-B67-2 were found most tolerant to high temperature as they showed significant enhancement in grain yield (70.95%), 1000 grain weight (36.72%) and harvest index (43.58%). Therefore, these three potential genotypes can be exploited for further studies with respect to high temperature stress (heat stress) to obtain the best heat resistant rice genotype with high production and improvement of rice genotype for heat resistance.