Abstract

Chickpea is mainly grown on marginal lands across the Pakistan where it has to face the problem of water shortage due to erratic water availability. For improvement of chickpea production, there is dire need for development of drought tolerant chickpea genotypes with high yield potential. Therefore, 20 advanced lines were evaluated against three water treatments (irrigated, rainfed and rain shelters) by following two-factor factorial randomized complete block design. Treatment mean comparison showed that irrigation at initiation of flowering promoted the vegetative growth and reduced the grain yield by redirecting the translocation of assimilates to the vegetative parts instead of grains. Rain shelter treatment induced the earliness in chickpea genotypes to complete the life cycle as early as possible to avoid severe water shortage but due to earliness there was great yield penalty in genotypes. Principal component analysis (PCA) based on drought tolerance indices converted the traits into principal components (PCs) in which PC 1 and PC 2 contributed 84.62% cumulative variability. So, these components were used for making biplot graph. Biplot categorized the genotypes into four distinct groups. Group-1 which was characterized to have the genotypes with superior performance under normal and stressed conditions included CM 1403/08, CM 1909/08, CM 516/06, D 096-11, CH 51/07, CH 54/07 and TGDX 203. Genotypes of group-1 were selected to be used as parents to develop high yielding genotypes because these genotypes showed highest yield under diverse water regimes. Other three groups had least importance as their tolerance level and potential yield was lower than Group-1.