**4. Conclusions**

Genetic resources are recognized as the fourth essential input after water, soil, and light. It is the need of hour to utilize leguminous genetic resources to meet the global challenges like population explosion, malnutrition, and hunger. Legumes are dominated by rice-wheat system in the past with the major focus on cereal production worldwide. This has led to a substantial decrease in research on legumes. In view of the current climate change scenario and environmental disturbances, research on landraces and CWR is strengthened in effective and efficient manner. Legumes have the potential to contribute significantly to ecofriendly agricultural land use and sustainable forage production in the tropics. Earlier, genebanks were focusing on the conservation of genetic resources, but emphasis has been shifted to conservation through utilization. Overall, legume genetic resources provide the new potential climate smart crops, viz., zombi pea, winged bean, and grass pea, and also new alleles which help in developing biotic and abiotic stress-tolerant varieties. It is much needed to identify the bottleneck for the utilization of the valuable germplasm of the legumes. With the advancement of the modern molecular technologies, the trait discovery and the markers linked to the traits need to be explored so that a large-scale screening would become possible and eventually help to reveal the real genetic potential of the germplasm conserved in the gene banks.
