Evaluation of some promising indigenous brinjal genotypes under terai region of West Bengal

Present experiment was implemented under the Department of Vegetable and Spice Crops, Uttar Banga Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Coochbehar which situated at terai region of West Bengal during the autumn-winter season of 2019-20 and 2020-21 on 28 highly diversified brinjal genotypes on ten highly important yield and yield attributing traits to assess the extent of involvement of different genetic phenomena in manifestation of important yield related traits and to understand the inter relationship among them to design better selection criteria. Result revealed that there was close proximity in the magnitude among the component of coefficient of variation and these component exhibited high estimates coupled with high heritability for almost all the characters excepting days to first flowers and days to fruit maturity indicated less interference of the environmental factors in the manifestation of these traits. High magnitude of heritability coupled with genetic advance of mean for those character suggested possibility for selecting these characters based on phenotypic performance for further improvement at desired direction. Residual effect from path analysis was 0.1367 at genotypic level which suggested that contribution of the traits under study was approximately 86.5% on yield, argued for appropriate selection of traits for success of present experimental study. From character associationship and path coefficient it was found that expected yield was highly correlated in positive direction with average fruits per plant (0.68 and 0.801), average fruit weight (0.48 and 0.565), numbers of primary branches per plant (0.51 and 0.113); hence, these yield attributing traits were significantly positively related with each other which suggested that simultaneous selective breeding strategy considering these characters for improvement of yield could be rewarding due to their probable conditioning by additive gene action.