**3. Management through cultural practices**

Cultural practices prevent the disease through disease avoidance, escape or protection because they disrupt the favorable interactions of the pathogen, host and environment. Cultural practices like cleaning of bunds and fields reduce the incidence as the disease has been reported on some of the weeds [21]. Date of planting and maturity time of different genotypes have significant effects on the incidence and severity of the false smut [22]. Water management and fertilization affected false smut incidence [23]. The late-maturing varieties exhibited higher rates of infection even though three different sowing dates with an interval of 14 days were set for each variety under examination [24]. Furthermore, early maturing rice varieties escaped from false smut infection, while the late maturing ones did not. Disease avoidance by changing date of sowing/planting is an established fact and very economical and practical for marginal farmers in managing plant disease. Therefore, changing sowing time is a preventive control strategy that can be opted by the marginal farmers when the disease is endemic in a location with a susceptible cultivar.

#### **4. Management through bio-agents**

Biological control is the use of living organism to inhibit/kill the other target living organism (**Figure 2**). It is the most eco-friendly and economical method of plant disease management when there is no resistant variety available. The major mechanisms of biological control are follows;


The management of the rice false smut disease is not well documented, as its striking epidemiological features under field conditions are still uncertain. Therefore, integrated management of the false smut using fungicide applications, cultural practices and deployment of resistant cultivars if available, have been tried before to a certain extent with average results [25].

**Figure 2.** *Mycelial growth inhibition of* U. virens *at the Centre by* Trichoderma harzianum *at the periphery.*

Biological control by *Trichoderma viride*, *Trichoderma virens*, *Trichoderma harzianum* and *Trichoderma reesei* were studied under *in vitro* and reported that all the isolates of Trichoderma have showed antagonistic activity against *U. virens* [26] but their utilization is not advisable as they are the preliminary results, which are not tested in fields. There is a report of *Antennariella placitae* (endophyte) as a good candidate for application as safe biological control agent against *U. virens* in vitro and in vivo [27]. The biological control by *Bacillus subtilis* showed least false smut disease severity under field evaluation (First author, unpublished). Biological control is eco-friendly and safe to the environment. They are much cheaper than fungicides. Thus, bio-control of rice false smut disease either individually or in integrated disease management approach might offer a more effective substitute to unsafe chemicals which is uneconomical and cause a substantial damage to the public health, environment as well as groundwater pollution. It is also considered as a very worthy alternative since it mimics the nature's own way of equilibrating the population of living organisms in the ecosystem. Whenever possible, bio-agents should be used because it is a neglected area of false smut research. Future research is desirable to bring out effective bio-agent for false smut disease.
