DROUGHT TOLERANCE INDICES OF WHEAT (Triticum aestivum L.) GENOTYPES UNDER WATER DEFICIT CONDITIONS

Nowadays drought stress is one of the major abiotic factors to limiting access to high yield by restricting growth and development of wheat crop in arid and semi-arid areas. For the isolation of consequences of drought tolerance on morpho-physiological characters, an experiment was conducted on ten bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes during the season of 2017-2018. Thus the experiment was laid out in split plot design with three replication consisting of two treatments (i.e. normal and water deficit) conditions. The variance among the treatment and genotypes were significant at 1% and 5% for all the characters. However, treatment × genotypes had also meaningful association with majority of the characters except spike length and spikelets per spike. For the maximum performance of wheat genotypes under water limited conditions, selection indices is a best tool to evaluate the best genotypes for water deficit conditions therefore, eight yield index selection indices are: yield stability index, stress tolerance index, sensitivity drought tolerance, stress susceptibility index, tolerance index, mean productivity and geometric mean productivity were calculated for grains yield per plant and harvest index. From these indices it was concluded that Bhittai and NIA Sunder were the best genotypes under both conditions, SKD-1, Sassui and NIA Amber displayed better performance under optimum availability of water, Hamal and Kiran-95 were water stress tolerant while the NIA Sunder, Khirman and Marvi were the susceptible ones. Correlation of indices has also been worked out.