~ 1084 ~ Journal of Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry 2020; 9(5): 1084-1087 E-ISSN: 2278-4136 P-ISSN: 2349-8234 www.phytojournal.com JPP 2020; 9(5): 1084-1087 Received: 03-07-2020 Accepted: 30-08-2020 Dinesh Sah Department of Agronomy, College of Agriculture, Banda University of Agriculture and Technology, Banda, Uttar Pradesh, India Mukul Kumar Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, College of Agriculture, Banda University of Agriculture and Technology, Banda, Uttar Pradesh, India Siddhartha Singh Department of Basic Sciences and Humanities, College of Horticulture and Forestry, Central Agricultural University, Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, India Corresponding Author: Mukul Kumar Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, College of Agriculture, Banda University of Agriculture and Technology, Banda, Uttar Pradesh, India Evaluation of lentil varieties under foot hill of north east agro-ecological region of India Dinesh Sah, Mukul Kumar and Siddhartha Singh DOI: https://doi.org/10.22271/phyto.2020.v9.i5o.12376 Abstract Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik) is the important pulse crop grown mainly on residual soil moisture in rabi season. There is an ample scope for expansion of area under pulse crop like lentil in conserved soil moisture in North Eastern Hill Region of India where a large part of area remains fallow after the kharif season rice. In view of this, a field evaluation of nine most promising lentil varieties was conducted under conserved soil moisture at College of Horticulture & Forestry, Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, India during 2015-16 and 2016-17 to identify the most suitable lentil varieties under residual soil moisture condition in rice fallows. The data of two year experiment revealed that lentil variety IPL-316 exhibited maximum seed yield (11.03 q/ha) with minimum days to maturity (116 days). The other varieties with considerably fair seed yield performance were DPL 62 (6.49 q/ha), HUL 57 (6.10 q/ha) and WBL 77 (5.68 q/ha) with 127, 118 and 130 days to maturity. Linear relationship of seed yield with branches/plant and pods/plant indicated that these two traits should be considered for selection of high yielding varieties/lines, however, a quadratic relationship of seeds/pod and 1000 seed weight was observed with seed yield. The significant yield performance of lentil varieties clearly showed that there is enough opportunity of lentil cultivation in rice fallow with appropriate technologies for enhancing farmers’ income as well as food and nutritional security of the region. Keywords: Evaluation, lentil varieties, yield attributes, NEH region, rice fallow 1. Introduction The North East Region (NER) of sub-tropical India covers the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim with a cultivated area of about 2 million hectares (Sanwal et al. 2007) [10] . Communities in NER are predominately agrarian and practice subsistence agriculture. Development of sustainable farming systems is the key to prosperity of this region and requires crop diversification by involving pulses. The region has more than 80% area under acid soils and hence, the importance of legumes is better understood than in other parts of the country. Pulses, in fact, constitute the most common source of non-cereal protein, where the frequency of pulse consumption is higher than that of any other protein source. Pulses play a key role in improvement of soil fertility through biological nitrogen fixation mediated through Rhizobium bacteria in the root nodules. Subsequent crops raised in rotation to pulses exhibit a yield increase of 20-40% (Joshi, 1998) [5] . Cultivation of pulses are also an effective means of restoring degraded soils and can contribute significantly to achieving the twin objectives of increasing productivity as well as improving the sustainability of cereal-based cropping systems (Yadav et al. 1998) [12] . The per capita pulse availability in NER is hardly 12.5 g against 43.3 g at national level. Considering the recommended per head dietary pulse intake of 50 g, the pulse production in this region needs to be increased by almost 10 times to make this region self-sufficient in pulses (Das et al. 2016) [3] . The fact that the productivity of the pulses in this region (886 kg/ha) is higher than that of country’s (728 kg/ha) indicated that this region suits well to pulse production (An nual Report 2016) [1] . In north eastern region, where a large part of land remains fallow after the kharif rice, there is enough scope to utilize these areas under pulse crops like lentil in rice fallows on residual soil moisture. Due to lack of irrigation facility and early onset of rains (March-April), the early maturing high yielding lentil varieties may escape the drought and coincidence of pre monsoon rains during maturity to avoid poor quality of seed, and thus could convert mono- cropped areas in to double crop area to increase legume production and sustain productivity of the rice based systems. The introduction of promising and early maturing high yielding lentil varieties may be significant to increase the productivity with more income to farmers and achieving self-sufficiency in this region.