Critical abiotic factors affecting implementation of technological innovations in rice and wheat production: A review

Rice and wheat are two major staple food crops in India and worldwide. Over the years the yield potential of the crops has been affected by abiotic factors, which is further projected to increase due to climate change induced environmental adversities. Typically these two crops have different growing conditions, rice requiring high water for cultivation unlike wheat which is water demanding and sensitive to larger variability in temperature regimes. In the recent past drought and disease stress, besides several other stresses, are considered to be critical factors affecting the growth and yield of crops, which is evident in the recent decades. Admittedly, drought stress coupled with biotic stress will further contribute for declining performance of crop varieties and difficult to alleviate even with innovative technological innovations. Few of the technological innovations like high yielding varieties, genetically modified cultivars, integrated nutrient management, integrated pest management, water conservation strategies and prophylactic measures to avoid the disease/pest outbreak, though with potential to augment the yield losses is affected by the stresses. Attempts have also been made to utilize transgenic technologies to build intrinsic tolerance mechanisms by the plants through alteration to functional genes. However, sustainable technologies like classical breeding approaches and integrated farming principles are also being considered to develop crops adaptation and/or enhance the adaptive mechanisms by aligning with technological interventions. Though, several technologies show promise but constrained by the limitations to achieve ‘one-fits-all’ model to overcome the interactive effects of abiotic stressors. Visibly, the crop growth and yield enhancement through technological innovations is call of the day as climate change induced aggravation of these stressors on crop production is imminent. Skilful integration of technological innovations to suit the local and regional scale crop husbandry systems may have promise to address the abiotic stress to realize economic yield of crops like rice and wheat. The review will argumentatively analyse few critical stressors that limit the successful implementation of technological innovations to sustain the rice/wheat crop production and resilience building in the millennia.