**3. Plant breeding methods used to develop aromatic varieties in India**

In India, the systematic rice breeding program started with the establishment of agricultural organizations like ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Delhi) in 1929; NRRI (National Rice Research Institute, Orissa) in 1946; Directorate of Rice Research; and Agricultural universities [3]. Aromatic rice breeding program was initiated at research stations: *Kala Shah Kaku* (Punjab state, now in Pakistan) and *Nagina* (Uttar Pradesh, India) [3] in 1920s. Further a separate program namely Basmati Variety Development Program was started at different research stations in India at Kaul, Kapurthala, Pantnagar and New Delhi, to develop new Basmati varieties by applying pureline selection in available germplasm, using dwarfening genes and hybridization techniques. These iniations, and diligence of plant breeders led to the development of few short, medium, and long grained aromatic varieties and a total of 30 notified Basmati varieties. PB-1718 is latest addition to this list; notified as Basmati variety in 2019 (APEDA [10], Basmati Crop Survey Report, *Kharif*, Volume 2).

Breeding for aromatic rice varieties is a complex task which is attributed to its quality traits. In a study Khush and Juliano [11] gave three reasons which adversely affect the aromatic rice breeding programs, 1) number of breeding objectives are more; 2) lack of equipment to measure grain quality and; 3) selection indices are not well defined. In present time the second problem has been overcome due to development of different equipments, software etc. to measure to the quality attributes of aromatic rice. Still breeding for aromatic rice is a complicated task, attributed to reasons outlined in the following paragraph; after reviewing work of famous scientists on aromatic rice:


Some of the most common breeding methods practiced to develop aromatic rice varieties in India are listed below:
