Continuously rising global temperature enhances drought stress in rain-fed low and upland areas by depleting the water level from the soil surface and plants by increasing the temperature of surface air. By this, seed formation is disturbed at the time of fertilization due to lack of enough water during flowering. Hence, the rate of grain yielding decreases significantly in drought susceptible rice genotypes. This study is to explore a rice variety ADT37 which is widely cultivated in the southern part of India incorporated with qDTY3.1 and qDTY2.1 linked with higher/ constant grain yield were evaluated under nonflooding conditions at field level during Rabi season of 2023–24 in Kandaswami Kandar’s College campus, Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu. Here, rice lines with an increased number of fertile seeds are linked with a higher growth rate of plant height, root length, flag leaf length and width, number of tillers, and total plant biomass but not with panicle length, dry weight of panicle, total number of seed, 1,000 seed weight, seed length, and width. Thus, improved rice lines showed an increased grain yield of up to 36.4% over the parental line under nonflooding conditions. It reveals that the incorporated quantitative trait locus based on the selection of rice lines with positive and higher heterosis adapted to the genome of ADT37 rice variety and it is expressed well through many agronomic traits in order to increase the grain yields under nonflooding conditions. This variety having water use efficiency would be used under water-limited conditions following further evaluation.
Key words: Drought stress, grain yield, agronomic characters, non-flooding, Water use efficiency.
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