Biotechnological Interventions and their Role in Sustainable Hill Agriculture

The ever increasing demand for food, feed, nutrition and other basic needs has put a lot of pressure on the agricultural and horticultural sectors in terms of addressing the accompanied challenges associated with increasing crop productivity in hills. At the same time, we are witnessing the potential benefits of the revolutions forced by the science of biotechnology. Biotechnology has played an important role towards the attainment of production sustainability of crops by using various biotechnological tools. Biotechnology has the potential to provide new opportunities for achieving enhanced crop productivity in a way that will alleviate poverty, improve food security and nutrition, and promote sustainable use of natural resources in hill farming system. Conventional and biotechnological research inputs have contributed in solving some of the constraints limiting crop productivity. However, limitations such as complex genome, narrow genetic base, poor fertility, susceptibility to biotic and abiotic stresses and long duration to breed elite cultivars, hinder crop improvement programmes. Several radiation induced mutants with agronomically desirable traits were isolated and evaluated under field conditions, besides studying abiotic stress responses using molecular tools. This article describes the developments in the in vitro culture systems and related biotechnologies tools such as marker-assisted selection (MAS), marker-assisted breeding (MAB), QTL mapping etc. that are evolving as novel strategies in the recent years for use in crop improvement.