**2. Anthracnose disease losses**

The word anthracnose derived from Greek language meaning 'coal' it is the common name of plant disease with very dark, sunken lesions and containing fungal spores [12]. Typical symptoms (**Figure 1**) of anthracnose on chilli fruit include dark spots, sunken necrotic tissue with concentric rings of acervuli. Besides fruit rot, it also causes leaf spots, dieback on stem, seedling blight, or damping off. This disease not only affects the quality of fruit by appearance of anthracnose lesion but also reduces dry weight of fruit, and quantity of capsaicin and oleoresin [13, 14].

Losses are caused by this disease worldwide; it is reported that in Vietnam it causes 20–80% yield loss [15], 10% yield loss in Korea [16], 50% yield loss in Malaysia [17] and as high as 80% yield loss (during severe epidemics) in Thailand [18]. In India, a calculated loss of 10–54% has been reported in yield due to this disease [19, 20], and this disease is reported throughout India but it found to be more common and aggressive form in Assam, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh [10]. The anthracnose pathogen has been intercepted in seed and it has been reported that there is occurrence of pathogen in seed samples, upto 5% infection index indicates its wide spread occurrence in India [21].

**Figure 1.**

*(a) Healthy chilli plant, (b) chilli plant affected with anthracnose disease, and (c) chilli fruits showing anthracnose symptom.*
