Response of Different Pre-Sowing Seed Treatments with Biofertilizers, Biostimulants and Botanicals on Growth, Yield and Yield Attributing Traits in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) var. Desi Himmat

Legumes are the richest protein sources of human diet, livestock of people in poor areas, green fodder to animals and are also used as green manure crops. The present study entitled, “Response of different pre- sowing seed treatments with Biofertilizers, Biostimulants and Botanicals on growth, yield and yield attributing traits in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) var. desi himmat”, was carried out in rabi 2021-2022 at crop research farm, SHUATS, Prayagraj with rhizobium, vermiwash, neem and tulsi leaf extracts of varying concentrates at duration of 12hrs. in three replications with randomized block design with an objective to assess the effect of these priming treatments on chickpea and to find the promising pre-sowing treatment. The results depicted that priming is an alternate strategy to improve the growth, yield and it recorded significant variation for all the parameters that were studied on comparison to the untreated control (T0). Seed priming with T5-Vermiwash at 10% for 12 hrs. recorded field emergence of 90% and 35.00 pods per plant, 1.66 seeds per pod, 14.70 g seed yield per plant, 24.79 g of 100 seed weight, 37.65 g of biological yield per plant and 39.08 % of harvest index. Thus, priming with T5-Vermiwash at 10% for 12 hrs. was found so productive on chickpea and can be suggested for cultivation on commercial scale.