Indian Forage Genetic Resources: Perspectives and Strategies

The Indian agro-biodiversity is distributed in 15 agro-climatic zones, each with different agro-ecosystem, possessing unique gene pools and comprise of landraces, primitive forms and wild relatives of different crops including the forages species. Most of these species have origf -.a^d in this part of the globe. Forages are generally treated as orphan crops, but are very important for sustainable development of Indian dairy and allied sectors. Efforts to explore, collect, introduce from exotic sources, evaluate, conserve, manage and restoration of indigenous forage genetic resources in India would be helpful in enrichment of forage gene pool of India. Priorities have been worked out for forage/fodder crops for introduction along with some potential wild and weedy relatives of these crops for their utilization in National Crop Improvement Programmes. Objective of this article is to emphasize the importance of forage genetic resources and generate-awareness among the workers engaged in the breeding/crop improvement of forage crops to meet out the national security on feed and fodder and vis-a-vis quality of fodder.