New Delhi, September 15: Union minister Jitendra Singh on Tuesday inaugurated the SpeedSeed Phenotyping and Resource Optimization for Unified Trait Analysis (SPROUT) facility at the BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi, describing it as an indigenous capability for developing climate-resilient crops.
Singh, who holds independent charge of the science and technology ministry, said the facility would allow researchers to evaluate crops such as chickpea under different environmental conditions, connecting advances in genomics and gene editing with faster trait evaluation and breeding. He said the initiative is part of the government’s BioE3 policy, which includes climate-resilient agriculture among its priority areas.
The institute has also developed SpeedSeed, a separate technology that can shorten the chickpea breeding cycle to around 40 days, considerably reducing conventional research timelines, Singh said.
Between 2014 and 2026, the Department of Biotechnology has supported more than 300 projects in agriculture biotechnology, resulting in over 50 improved crop varieties with greater tolerance to drought, floods, salinity, pests and diseases, according to the department. Seventeen climate-resilient rice varieties developed under a genomics-assisted breeding programme are now grown across nearly 15 lakh hectares, it said.