Indian Phytopath. 70 (1) : 22-31 (2017) DOI 10.24838/ip.2017.v70.i1.48985 Growing with wheat and barley rusts for three decades * S.C. BHARDWAJ ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research, Regional Station, Flowerdale, Shimla 171 002, Himachal Pradesh, India Received: 10 February 2017/ Accepted: 20 February 2017/ Published online: 23 March 2017 © Indian Phytopathological Society 2017 Keywords: Barley, epidemiology, pathotypes, Puccinia spp., rust, wheat AWARDS AND HONOURS *S.N. Dasgupta Memorial Award Lecture, delivered at 69th Annual Meeting of Indian Phytopathological Society and National Symposium on “Diagnosis of and management of plant diseases: Integrated approaches and recent trends”. January 9-11, 2017 at ICAR Complex for NEH Region, Umiam, Shillong, Meghalaya Email: scbfdl@hotmail.com I feel honoured and elated for being conferred S.N. Dasgupta memorial award. I am grateful to the Indian Phytopathological Society to bestow this honour upon me which is named after one of the great Scientists of all the times. Dr. Dasgupta belonged to a family of distinguished people. He did pioneer research on physiological plant pathology, was an excellent Fungal taxonomist who rose to become the Vice Chancellor of Kalyani University, a position he served for two terms. I think he would have been very happy today to see that I would be discussing very important disease rust and sharing my experience with this august gathering, on ways and means to secure wheat. This crop is synonym to economic health and nutritional security of many countries with India no exception. Today we remember Dr. Dasgupta for the work done by him for the progress of biosciences and this lecture is a tribute to the great soul. Wheat is a staple diet, protein source and second largest produced cereal in the world. Accounting for a one fifth of humanity’s food, wheat provides 21% of the food calories and 20% of the protein for more than 4.5 billion people in 94 developing countries. It contributes to 30% of the world’s edible dry and 60% of the daily calorie intake. Indian agriculture contributes about 14.1% to the GDP and employs more than 58.2% of the population. Current wheat production of India is 93.50 million tonnes from an area of 30.23 million hectares with an average production of 30.93Q per hectare. With a change in the food habits, there has been increasing demand for wheat in the recent past. Agriculture today is plagued with many hurdles. Soils have become sick, there are new biotic, abiotic threats, there is indiscriminate use of chemicals, water sources have become scant, inputs are costly and there is decrease in net profits. Biggest challenge for us is to produce 120 million tonnes of wheat by 2050 to feed 1.7 billion people of India. Wheat production is prone to many biotic and abiotic constraints. Rusts are historic, threatening and major biotic constraints of wheat worldwide. Stripe rust is a challenge to wheat production in west Asia, southern Africa, the Far East (China), South America and northern Europe. Leaf rust caused more serious losses in south Asia, North Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. Black rust has been traditionally important in North America, Australasia, northern Africa, South Africa and, to some extent , Europe (Mc Intosh et al., 1995) . Depending upon the wheat cultivar and stage of growth, wheat rust epidemics can inflict losses up to 100 % due to stripe and stem rusts whereas 40% in leaf rust (Anonymous, 1992). Specialization of parasitism in black rust was demonstrated by Dr. E.C. Stakman while working in Cereal Rust Laboratory at Minnesota U.S.A. in the second decade of twentieth century. Races were identified on distinguishing hosts called differentials. Likewise work for other wheat rusts was published in the third decade. Wheat rust research in India started around 1922 with the efforts of Dr. Karam Chand Mehta of Agra College, Agra, who initially funded the programme using his own savings and selected four places. Among Agra, Almora, Muree (now in Pakistan) and Shimla, he selected the later for its suitability for growing wheat and rusts throughout the year with little efforts. Later on Imperial Council of Agriculture Research (British India) granted funds in 1930. His landmark contributions have been to investigate the recurrence of wheat rusts in India, non functional nature of alternate hosts under Indian conditions, wheat rust surveys, race analyses, evaluation for rust resistance and initiation of systematic wheat rust research in India (Mehta, 1940,1952). A detailed account of wheat rusts has been published recently (Bhardwaj et al., 2016a).