The ‘brainstorming session’, among other things, showcased breakthroughs in Basmati breeding achieved by ICAR’s premier institute. These included cooked rice samples from recently developed lines, of which one particular lot caught Mr Anil Mittal’s attention. “This is the best rice I have ever seen,” the Chairman of Khushi Ram Behari Lal (now KRBL Ltd) told its chief breeder, Dr V.P. Singh.
The image of those 20-odd grains did not leave Mr Mittal’s mind. He persistently enquired about the progress of the line that was still undergoing station trials at IARI. Finally, in March 2001, Dr Singh spared half-a-kg of milled rice to get an informed industry feedback — from someone showing extraordinary interest.
The sheer quality of the rice, cooked this time in KRBL’s own laboratory, further convinced Mr Mittal of its potential and he obtained 3.5 kg of nucleus seeds from Dr Singh. He then got this paddy planted through a contract farmer — a full year before the line had even entered the national-level coordinated trials in the kharif season of 2002!
The 3.5 kg seeds yielded 1.4 tonnes of paddy, of which, 1.2 tonnes were re-planted the following kharif and, in turn, gave 476 tonnes. From these, 50 tonnes were sown afresh in kharif 2003, resulting in another 20,000 tonnes. The same year, the variety was officially released for commercial cultivation as Pusa-1121.
In the next three seasons, Mr Mittal again planted 100, 160 and 300 tonnes, producing 40,000, 64,000 and 1,20,000 tonnes grain, respectively. All this, from the initial 3.5 kg material supplied by Dr Singh.
Early-bird advantageDuring this period, Mr Mittal was also milling the paddy not set aside for multiplication. This milled rice was being sent for test-marketing in containers to West Asia, where the response was overwhelming.
“Till 2005, I was purchasing the country’s entire Pusa-1121 crop. By 2006, others too came to know of this magic grain and were procuring it from the market. But I had already built a good stock of rice, properly aged for over a year and ready for marketing,” noted Mr Mittal, who exploited his early-bird advantage to also invest in a specially created ‘India Gate Classic’ brand for the product.
What was so ‘magical’ about this grain that had a Delhi-based exporter so excited?
For that, one must go back a little to 1968, when IARI was headed by Dr M. S. Swaminathan. Dr Singh, who hailed from an agricultural family in Gurukul Narsan near Roorkee (Uttarakhand), had just joined as a research assistant at IARI’s Division of Genetics.
“It was Dr Swaminathan who founded a dedicated Basmati breeding programme at IARI. He used to tell me: Since you have a Basmati farming background, you should develop better Basmati varieties for farmers,” recalled Dr Singh. Initially, IARI scientists undertook collection of traditional Basmati cultivars from farmers’ fields, which was followed by their pure line selection for uniformity of plant height, maturity and grain quality. It was through this screening process that Karnal Local was identified as a superior traditional ‘check’ variety over the more commonly grown Basmati-370.
The former had an average milled rice kernel length of 7.15 mm and elongated to nearly twice this length on cooking, while being only 6.9 mm and 1.9 times for Basmati-370. Karnal Local gained prominence when United Riceland Ltd, from 1984 onwards, started exporting it under the ‘Tilda’ brand.
Swaminathan’s visionFor all their unique grain attributes (aroma, fluffiness and linear elongation on cooking) though, the traditional Basmati plants had drawbacks. They were tall (150-160 cm), weak-stemmed, prone to lodging and yielded 9-10 quintals of paddy an acre over 155-160 days, leading to delayed wheat sowing.
“Dr Swaminathan always felt we need to combine the grain quality traits of traditional Basmatis with the high-yielding background of modern dwarf varieties. Only then can Basmati cultivation be viable,” added Dr Singh.
That vision fructified in November 1989 with the release of Pusa Basmati-1 (PB-1), for which Dr Singh did most of the groundwork. This was an evolved Basmati, derived from crossing Karnal Local with Pusa-150, a high-yielding, aromatic non-Basmati line. With a height of 100-105 cm, PB-1 did not lodge, gave 25-26 quintals and matured in 135-140 days.
Although the grain had only a mild aroma, it scored over Karnal Local in kernel length (7.3 mm) and elongation (2.02 times). At the turn of the century, India was exporting 0.6-0.7 million tonnes (mt) of basmati rice valued at Rs 2,000 crore annually – of which PB-1 contributed roughly 60 per cent.
But PB-1 was just the beginning. By the early 1990s, Dr Singh’s team had already generated several new promising lines, one of which eventually became Pusa-1121. This variety – whose immediate parents had genes from Basmati-370 and Type-3, both pure line selections from the traditional Dehraduni Basmati – marked a substantial improvement over PB-1.
Its grains had a milled length of 8 mm that elongated 2.7 times to 22 mm on cooking. Almost an inch! This was matched by volume expansion: A cup of milled rice gave 4.5 cups of cooked rice, against 4 for PB-1 and 3.7 for Karnal Local.
Volume for the Buck“The day I saw it, I knew it was worth putting my money,” said Mr Mittal. So was it for the farmers too. Pusa-1121 yielded 20-21 quintals, marginally below PB-1 (25-26 quintals) and the regular Parmal paddy (30 quintals). But in terms of price, if Parmal fetched X, farmers got 1.5X for PB-1 and 2X for Pusa-1121. Occasionally, Pusa-1121 commanded a premium over even traditional Basmatis.
“Overseas buyers were prepared to pay more because it gave extra volume for the dollar. A few grains could fill up whole plates and this more than compensated for lower aroma,” he pointed out.
This year, India’s basmati shipments are expected at 2.5 mt, with Pusa-1121 alone touching one mt. At an average $1,300 a tonne realisation, this variety is well worth over a billion dollars in annual export earnings. In the meantime, IARI has released Pusa-1401, which, it claims, addresses the shortcomings of PB-1 and Pusa-1121 with regard to aroma and chalky grains content.
“We are also working on reducing the susceptibility of these varieties to bacterial leaf blight and rice blast fungus through new approaches such as molecular breeding,” informed Dr A.K. Singh, who is managing IARI’s Basmati program since his senior colleague’s retirement in January 2007. Pusa-1121’s story should be an eye-opener for all those who have written off public research in Indian agriculture. Even today, there are people – not as famous as Norman Borlaug, M.S. Swaminathan, G.S. Khush or V.S. Mathur – working against all odds and resource constraints to produce research of immense value.
All it takes are more Mr Mittals willing to make that extra effort in unlocking this hidden value.
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