In present era problems like population incensement, food insecurity, loss of genetic diversity, challenging environmental etc. are directly or indirectly becoming huge obstacles in achieving the goal of providing every person daily basic food requirement. These conditions have put humankind in dangerous situation like Malnutrition. About 14.8% of Indian population has been affected by malnutrition. Although government is making policies and plans to fight against malnutrition but their efforts are insufficient to wipe out root cause of this problem. Therefore there is an urgent need of development of new scientific approaches and methods to battle against malnutrition. A big population of India relies on vegetarian sources of food and pulses are one of the main constituent of Indian vegetarian diet. Pulses provide good quality of protein and increasing the production of pulses in country will definitely be a great stride to fight malnutrition. Increase in population has made pulses demand high and because of its low productivity and importance in Indian diet caused big spike in their prices. Imports of pulses have been increased due to its insufficient availability in the country and this is causing harm to our economy. Good quality of protein is inaccessible for poor people and malnutrition showing its effect on the population of all age groups. Therefore techniques like mutation breeding are highly needed to be introduced in these situations. Mutation breeding is one of the best techniques to bring genetic improvement in pulse crop in the short period of time. Mutation breeding is highly productive technique against malnutrition and to fulfill nutritional demand of increasing human population. Induced mutagenesis is very effective to introduce superior nutritional quality and wider adaptability in pulse crop. Another advantage of induced mutagenesis is that, we can apply physical and chemical mutagens on large population within short period of time. With the aid of molecular techniques combined with mutation breeding, we can bring a revolution in overall crop improvement and enhancement in their quality traits within limited interval of time. Mutation breeding is a technique which deals with producing genetic changes by inducing mutation in it. Mutation occurs in environment naturally but rate of spontaneous mutation is very low. It can be produced artificially by various means with the focus of achieving a specific target. Mutation is very efficient technique to generate beneficial variations within small interval of time. There are various reasons for low productivity of pulses in India like less sown area, rain fed conditions, marginal farmers, lack of awareness, low productivity etc. Keeping these facts in view concerted effort has been made not only to enhance the productivity of pulses but also to ameliorate the quality of pulses. In the present article the focus has been made to wipe out malnutrition from the country with the help of mutation breeding.

Download this article as