**3. All India coordinated crop improvement projects system of varietal testing**

First AICCIP was started in way back of 1957 by ICAR on maize crop for systemic testing of entries and for release of high yielding new maize varieties. In general, the three-tier system of multi-location evaluation is used for three years except perennial fodder crops (requires four years-one for crop establishment and three for evaluation) in India. Multilocational trials are conducted by the Project Coordinator (PC)/ Project Director (PD) of AICCIPs [3] with the help of concerned principle investigators. The AICCIPs have been developed for all the major crops including forage crops. The AICCIPs come under the umbrella of ICAR, has great role in the development of improved crop varieties and generation of production and protection technologies that directly benefit farmers for their economic amelioration. All AICCIP trials are well organized, systemic and conducted through a uniform testing procedure across the centers as per crop standard. It is a powerful system to screen large number of entries and recommend well-tested, superior, and adapted new cultivars to the end users. The flow chart of varietal release and notification in India is illustrated in **Figure 1.**

Newly entered material/entries into the three-tier system must have the following requirements.

• Station trial or preliminary yield trial-Concerned plant breeder must perform station or regional trial and proposed entry must have undergone censorious

*Varietal Release, Notification and Denotification System in India DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94212*

**Figure 1.** *Flow chart of plant varietal release and notification system in India.*

evaluation process or screening (insect pests and diseases). Crop based quality parameters and tolerance to key abiotic stresses are also to be screened as per the requirement. Pre-coordinated trial data on yield, trait stability and other related agronomic traits must be available to the PC/PD in support of the relevance of his/her entry [4].


• All the material (product of selection, hybridization followed by selection, synthetics, composites, and hybrids, etc.) shall be subjected to the same system.
