Genetic divergence for yield attributing traits in the Rabi sorghum germplasm

Mahalanobis D2 statistics was used to assess the divergence among the 45 rabi sorghum landraces, 13 advanced breeding lines and 4 popular cultivars. The analysis of variance revealed significant differences among the genotypes for all the 7 traits studied. The 62 genotypes were grouped into 15 clusters where cluster I was the largest comprising of 41 genotypes followed by cluster III with 7 genotypes and cluster XI with 2 genotypes. The inter cluster distance was maximum between cluster XIII and XIV followed by cluster XIV and XV, cluster XII and XV, cluster XII and XIII and cluster V and XIV. Based on the inter cluster distance and per se performance, the elite variety Phule Anuradha, the landraces RSV 1426, SSRG 147, Pusegaon local and the advanced breeding line RSV 1420 can be utilized in breeding programmes as potential parents for crop improvement. Seed yield contributed maximum to divergence (31.84%) followed by plant height (20.62%) and days to 50% flowering (14.38%).