India’s Achievements in Science and Technology-III

II. Agriculture and Industrial: 

(i)Rice variety Samba Mahsuri: With the support of Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Scientists at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Directorate of Rice Research (DRR) have jointly developed bacterial blight resistant Rice variety “Samba Mahsuri’ through Marker Assisted Selection and Backcross Breeding. The variety has so far spread to an area of 90,000 ha in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

(ii) Decoding the Wheat Genome: A strong partnership in Decoding the Wheat Genome has been built. 15 countries joined hands to complete this huge task of decoding 17,000 million bases. Indian Scientists participated in Decoding Chromosome 2A.

(iii) Maize hybrid (Vivek 9) with High Quality Protein and Increased Provitamin A was developed and released.

(iv) High zinc rice has been developed for the first time which has 22-24 ppm zinc and named as CGZR-1 and after all India trials would be available to farmers in another two years.

(v) 12 popular rice varieties to be grown in the rain fed agri-eco systems have been developed by incorporating major quantitative trait loci (QTL) or genes for flood, drought and salt tolerance. 

(vi) Bread wheat and durum wheat genotypes with high yield and high micronutrient concentration in optimum soil zinc have been developed.

(vii) First indigenous technology developed for commercial production of Ethanol from lignocellulosic waste: DBT-ICT Centre for Energy Biosciences established at Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai has developed Cellulosic ethanol technology.  Based on this indigenous technology a demo/pilot plant designed by an Industry, India Glycol Limited with financial support from DBT-BIRAC with a capacity of 10 tonnes lignocellulosic biomass per day to produce 3000 L ethanol/day on a continuous basis.  It is expected that the commercial plants based on the technology will be built in 2016, which is not far behind the technologies being implemented in the USA.

(viii) Under a Mission programme on microbial prospecting: ‘Drugs from Microbes’ Involving nine institutes and an industrial partner in a public-private partnership model, 2.50 lakhs microbes were screened for four activities i.e. anti cancer, anti diabetic, anti inflammation and anti infective activities. A total of 16123 three stars hits were obtained- Anti-infective- 5286; anti cancer-518; anti inflammation-3643; anti diabetic-6676. One New Chemical Entity with anticancer and anti-inflammatory activity and 12 probable new use of compound were identified. Efforts are being made to explore the strategies for moving some of the active molecules obtained in the current program from discovery to Pre- Investigational New Drug (IND) studies, thereby creating a path of development of molecules. The Country’s largest Microbial Culture Collection Centre was set up at NCCS, Pune will 2,00,000 culture.