Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) with the Central Potato Research Institute, (CPRI) in Tamil Nadu have developed two disease resistant potatoes – Kufri Sahyadri and Kufri Karan – hybrid varieties which at present show promising results in improving yield by 25% to 30% at laboratory level.

Both of these varieties are resistant to two most commonly affecting diseases like Potato Cyst (Nematode) and Late Blight disease of potato and are best suited for Karnataka climatic conditions.

ICAR-CPRI scientist, Priyank H. Mhatre said the CPRI plans to introduce these varieties to farmers next year. “We are still examining stages that are adopted prior to release seeds in large markets,” he added.

“We have partially succeeded in controlling this cyst in new varieties. Though the new varieties are in still developing stage but they have shown some promising outcome, which itself is a good sign in controlling this cyst,” he said. He added that both of these crops have passed the laboratory level tests and now field-testing has begun. Mhatre said that these two varieties will improve yield capacity about 20 to 25% besides reducing production cost by 30%.

According to him due to the regulatory considerations and potential risk involved in environmental and health hazards, the options for controlling this nematode are becoming increasingly limited. He added that among the available management options, trap and antagonistic crops offer viable alternatives for controlling PCN species.

“Therefore the present experiments were conducted to determine the effect of locally available nematode trap-crop, Solanum sisymbriifolium and antagonistic crops against potato cyst nematodes,” he said.

The scientist said that initially, S. sisymbriifolium was evaluated for its trap-crop potential against PCN and the results showed that S. sisymbriifolium acts as a resistant crop for both the species of PCN, as no females were observed on the roots of the trap-crop up to the end of the crop season.