Department of Crop Physiology

The Department of Crop Physiology at the University of Agricultural Sciences, GKVK, Bangalore was formally established in 1976 with the objectives of imparting undergraduate and graduate programs in Crop Physiology and also to undertake research in areas related to the physiology of crop plants. As the name of the Department indicates, there was a clear intention to keep the interest of the Department focussed on “crops” rather than “plants”. Accordingly since its inception, the Department has strived to make its teaching and research curricula to be increasingly crop physiology centric and be of relevance to the overall science of crop productivity.

While the pendulum of the rain drop holds the country to ransom, efforts have been on for the last few decades to gain some handle to reduce the consequences of the gamble of monsoon. Any effort that could alleviate the problem of drought afflicting the majority of Indian agriculture can change the face of India – from poverty to prosperity for her people. Towards this end, the Department of Crop Physiology at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore has been striving in the past 30 years to comprehensively address the plant responses to stress. The explicit aim of the program is to provide basic inputs that could be used in breeding crop plants for tolerance to drought and other abiotic stresses. The efforts at the Department have culminated in generating tomes of information on the response of plants to water stress, identification of germplasm tolerant to moisture stress, understanding the physiological mechanisms of tolerance and developing newer approaches towards breeding for or screening for drought tolerant crops. These outputs have greatly enriched the understanding of plant responses to abiotic stresses and offer a fertile field for taking up the challenging task of engineering plants for tolerance to abiotic stresses.