CH-52: Chilli hybrid suitable for low tunnel cultivation

Abstract

Chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) is an important spice-cumvegetable crop of the family Solanaceae. India is the largest producer, consumer and exporter of chillies in the world. Generally, the transplanting of chilli is done in February-March in North Indian plains and crop ends by October-November. However, there are some areas in Punjab where the chilli crop is transplanted in mid November under low tunnels to get early crop and this crop ends in June which is followed by late paddy varieties/Basmati crop. Thus, two crops in a rotation is practiced by transplanting chilli under low tunnel. The major bottleneck in this low tunnel cultivation is nonavailability of suitable variety/hybrid. Therefore, the breeding programm was initiated to develop CGMS lines in 2009 (Meena et al. 2018). From the developed 17 CGMS lines, the line CMS463D13A (renamed as MS13A) was used as female parent to cross with IS-261 to develop hybrid CH-52 which is suitable for low tunnel cultivation.