**5. Breeding approaches for drought resistance**

To improve crop at genetic level, plant breeders are usually more concerned in the use of intra specific variation, easily exploitable without any genetic barriers. Intra-specific crosses follow normal Mendelian segregation and selection of F2 at future generations to identify the suitable pant progenies including pure lines. Many breeding methods like mass selection, pure line recurrent selection, methods can be applied, in stress or non-stress conditions besides some other methods like in-vitro selection and usage of somaclonal variations can also be employed.


#### **Figure 2.**

*A breeding approach to develop drought resistant variety for different environmental conditions.*

It is significant that drought resistance is combined in to materials with more yield potential. Drought tolerance ability can be seen in improved cultivated, land races, related wild species or varieties developed using molecular breeding techniques. Breeding for drought resistant varieties is difficult to creation drought stress situations and selection of individuals is a difficult task which has to be carried out in rainout shelter conditions.

To identify drought resistance varieties and with high yielding ability both yield and yield related characters are evaluated in both irrigated and water stress conditions. Stability in yield for selected individuals are evaluated over different environments in both irrigated and stress conditions. The breeding approach should be able to combine high yielding with wide adaptability. Selection of individual progenies is selected by considering the average performance over wide range of environmental conditions under stress. The selected individuals are grown under best environments and in progeny selections are supported out for yield and yield characters. The breeding material evolved from breeding environments are lastly assessed in a wide range of environments and those showing high mean performance with high stability may be released for cultivation. A breeding approach to develop drought resistant variety for different environmental conditions (**Figure 2**).

### **6. Difficulties in drought resistance breeding**

