IARI — ICAR–Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa Campus, New Delhi: India's Deemed-to-be Agricultural University, the Green Revolution Wheat Anchor and Home of the Pusa Basmati Rice Programme

The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), headquartered on the Pusa Campus, New Delhi 110012, is India's premier agricultural research institute and, since 1958, a Deemed-to-be University under Section 3 of the UGC Act 1956. It operates under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India. Founded in 1905 as the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, Bihar — on a grant from American philanthropist Henry Phipps — and relocated to New Delhi in 1936 after the devastating Bihar–Nepal earthquake of 15 January 1934, IARI has been the anchor institution of Indian crop research for more than a century. It was the primary Indian institutional partner of Dr. Norman Borlaug's wheat programme in the mid-1960s, the home institute of Dr.  M.S. Swaminathan, and the origin of the Pusa Basmatirice varieties (Pusa Basmati 1, 1121, 1509, 1401, 1637, 1728) that today underwrite the great bulk of India's basmati exports. For the farmer-facing crop-protection quick reference see our pest & disease identification guide, and for the wider farmer-welfare portfolio see India government schemes for farmers.

At a glance

• Body type: flagship research institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR); Deemed-to-be University since 1958 under Section 3 of the UGC Act 1956.
• Founded: 1 April 1905 as the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, Bihar, on a grant from the American philanthropist Henry Phipps of Pittsburgh.
• Relocation: shifted to New Delhi in 1936 after the Bihar–Nepal earthquake of 15 January 1934 (magnitude ~8.0) damaged the Pusa (Bihar) campus.
• Headquarters: Pusa Campus, New Delhi 110012 — a ~500-acre campus between the Ring Road and Pusa Road in west-central Delhi.
• Parent ministry: Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India (via DARE / ICAR).
• Mandate: basic and strategic research in crop sciences, plant genetics and breeding, soil / water / environmental sciences and plant protection; post-graduate education (M.Sc. / Ph.D.); technology transfer to farmers.
• Structure: ~25 divisions and research centres on the Delhi campus, plus regional stations across the country; a Post Graduate School established in 1958.
• Flagship outputs: Green Revolution wheat varieties (Kalyansona, Sonalika, HD-2329, HD-2967, HD-3086, HD-3226); the Pusa Basmati rice series (Pusa Basmati 1, 1121, 1509, 1401, 1637, 1728); mustard, mungbean and vegetable Pusa varieties.
• Flagship extension event: annual Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela, typically late February / early March, drawing 100,000+ farmer visitors.
• Website: iari.res.in.

Origin, legal form and reporting line

IARI was constituted on 1 April 1905by Lord Curzon's Government of India as the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa in the Darbhanga (now Samastipur) district of northern Bihar, on land historically used by the Government for tobacco and horse-breeding. The founding grant came from the American steel-industry philanthropist Henry Phipps of Pittsburgh — a contemporary and business associate of Andrew Carnegie — who contributed ₤30,000 to establish the institute; the Government of India provided the campus, buildings and recurring costs. Under its first director, Dr. Bernard Coventry, and successors such as Albert Howard (later famous for pioneering organic-agriculture thinking through his book An Agricultural Testament), Pusa became the intellectual centre of scientific agriculture in British India.

On 15 January 1934 the Bihar–Nepal earthquake (magnitude ~8.0) struck the region and damaged the Pusa campus buildings so extensively that a full rebuild in place was ruled out. The Government of India decided to move the institute to New Delhi. A new ~500-acre campus was developed on Pusa Road, New Delhi— inheriting the “Pusa” toponym — and the Institute completed its relocation by 1936. The original Pusa (Bihar) site was retained as a satellite station and today hosts an IARI regional station alongside ICAR-RCER (Research Complex for Eastern Region). After Independence the institute was renamed the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, and in 1958 it was conferred Deemed-to-be University status under Section 3 of the UGC Act 1956 — the first agricultural research institute in India to be so designated.

IARI reports administratively and financially to ICAR headquarters at Krishi Bhavan, New Delhi, and through ICAR to the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE)of the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare. The Institute is led by a Director supported by a Joint Director (Research), Joint Director (Extension), a Dean who is also Joint Director (Education) heading the Post Graduate School, and Division / Centre Heads.

Divisions, centres and the Post Graduate School

IARI is organised into around 25 divisions and specialised centres on the Delhi campus, each led by a Head. The core divisions cluster in four broad programmatic families — plant sciences, natural-resource management, plant protection and post-harvest / social sciences:

• Plant sciences and breeding: Genetics, Agronomy, Plant Physiology, Seed Science and Technology, Horticulture, Floriculture and Landscaping, Biochemistry, Microbiology, Fruits and Horticultural Technology.
• Natural-resource management: Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Agricultural Physics, Water Technology Centre, Environment Science, the Centre for Environment Science and Climate Resilient Agriculture (CESCRA).
• Plant protection: Plant Pathology, Entomology, Nematology.
• Post-harvest, engineering and social sciences: Post-Harvest Technology, Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural Extension, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Statistics, the Centre for Protected Cultivation Technology (CPCT), the Nuclear Research Laboratory (NRL), and the National Phytotron Facility.

IARI's Post Graduate School, established in 1958alongside the Deemed-University conferment, is one of India's oldest agricultural graduate schools. It awards M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees across roughly 25 disciplines mapped to the divisions above. Admission is via the ICAR-AIEEA / AICE national entrance examinations, conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). The School's alumni populate ICAR institutes, State Agricultural Universities, CGIAR centres such as IRRI, CIMMYT and ICRISAT, and Indian and international agri-input and seed firms.

The Green Revolution wheat programme

IARI is inseparable from the story of India's Green Revolution. In the mid-1960s, as India faced successive drought and food crises, Dr. M.S. Swaminathan— then a young wheat breeder at IARI — invited Dr. Norman Borlaug, the CIMMYT wheat breeder later awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, to visit India and share the Mexican semi-dwarf wheat lines (Norin 10-derived) that Borlaug had bred at CIMMYT's wheat programme in Sonora. IARI led the Indian selection, adaptation and multiplication effort. The Institute's wheat programme released Kalyansona and Sonalika in 1967— the two workhorse Indian cultivars of the first Green Revolution wave in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh — and thereafter a continuous pipeline of “HD” (Hisar–Delhi lineage) wheats:

• HD-2285 and HD-2329 in the 1980s.
• HD-2687 and HD-2733 in the 1990s and early 2000s.
• HD-2967, released in 2011, which was for many years the most widely-grown wheat variety in India — planted at scale across the north-western plains, valued for its high grain yield, timely-sown adaptation, rust resistance and good chapati quality.
• HD-3086 (Pusa Gautami), HD-3226 (Pusa Yashasvi) and HD-3298 — the current generation of IARI wheats bred for combined rust resistance (yellow, brown, stem rust including Ug99-family races), heat tolerance and end-use quality.

Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, subsequently Director of IARI from 1972 to 1979, is widely credited as the “Father of India's Green Revolution” and went on to found the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai in 1988. IARI's wheat programme sits inside a national pipeline also anchored by ICAR-IIWBR (Karnal) — the Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research — which runs the national wheat rust surveillance dashboard and coordinates seed-replacement strategy for the north-western wheat belt.

The Pusa Basmati rice programme

Where wheat is the Green Revolution chapter of IARI's story, Pusa Basmatiis its export chapter. Basmati — the long-slender, aromatic rice grown across the Indo-Gangetic plains of Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, western Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir — is one of India's largest agricultural export earners, and the field is dominated by IARI-bred Pusa Basmati cultivars developed at the Division of Genetics:

• Pusa Basmati 1 (1989) — the first improved high-yielding Basmati released by IARI, marking the shift from tall, photoperiod-sensitive traditional basmatis to shorter, higher-yielding, dwarf backgrounds while retaining aroma.
• Pusa Basmati 1121 (2003) — the extra-long slender grain (average kernel length > 8.0 mm, length-after-cooking > 20 mm) cultivar that redefined the export market and has for many years accounted for a very large share of India's basmati export volumes.
• Pusa Basmati 1401 (2007) — a mid-early Basmati with strong aroma and grain quality, developed for the domestic and export markets.
• Pusa Basmati 1509 (2013) — a short-duration Basmati (~120 days, ~30 days earlier than 1121) that saves irrigation water, is well-adapted to direct-seeded rice (DSR) systems and permits earlier land-clearing for the succeeding wheat crop, easing residue-management pressure.
• Pusa Basmati 1637 (2017) — a bacterial-blight-resistant near-isogenic line of Pusa Basmati 1121, developed through marker-assisted selection to pyramid Xa13 and Xa21 resistance genes into the 1121 background.
• Pusa Basmati 1728 (2017) — a bacterial-blight-resistant near-isogenic line of Pusa Basmati 1401 with the same Xa13 + Xa21 gene pyramid.
• Pusa Basmati 1885 (2020) — an improved 1121 with combined bacterial-blight and blast resistance.

The Pusa Basmati programme, led at various points by Dr. V.P. Singh and later Dr. A.K. Singh at IARI's Division of Genetics, established basmati as a modern, high-yielding, exportable rice class while keeping the traditional aroma and cooking traits that basmati is protected for under GI Registration (the basmati GI is held jointly by APEDA-notified regions). The bacterial-blight resistant near-isogenic lines are a textbook case of applied marker-assisted selection in Indian rice breeding. Downstream export handling and pre-shipment residue testing sits with APEDA.

Other flagship crop varieties

• Mustard (Rai / Sarson): Pusa Bold, Pusa Jai Kisan, Pusa Mustard 21 / 22 / 25 / 26 / 28, and the low-erucic-acid Pusa Double Zero Mustard-31 — a widely-grown portfolio for the Indian rapeseed–mustard belt.
• Maize: Pusa Vivek QPM-9 Improved (Quality Protein Maize), Pusa HM-4 Improved, Pusa Vivek Hybrid series — IARI has been a leader in bio-fortified QPM maize.
• Pulses: Pusa Vishal (mungbean), Pusa Ratna and Pusa Baisakhi (mungbean), Pusa 256 (lentil), Pusa Basant (chickpea).
• Vegetables: the Pusa Ruby tomato, Pusa Purple Long brinjal, Pusa Naveen and Pusa Sneha okra, Pusa Snowball K-1 cauliflower, and dozens more “Pusa” vegetable varieties from the Division of Horticulture.
• Fruits and floriculture: Pusa Delicious and Pusa Arunima mango; Pusa-branded gladiolus, chrysanthemum and rose lines from the Division of Floriculture and Landscaping.

IARI's bio-fortification, protected-cultivation and climate-resilient breeding portfolios complement the mission-mode national crop programmes — NFSM for rice / wheat / pulses / coarse cereals, NMEO-Oilseeds for rapeseed–mustard / soybean / groundnut, and the seed multiplication pipeline anchored by BBSSL. The rainfed / dryland counterpart to IARI's largely irrigation-anchored crop pipeline is ICAR-CRIDA (Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture), Hyderabad — the ICAR nodal institute coordinating AICRPDA, AICRPAM and the NICRA climate-resilience mission, and the source of the District Agriculture Contingency Plans that operationalise kharif drought-management for 650+ districts.

IARI regional stations

IARI operates a network of regional stations across India's major agro-climatic zones, each with a specialised crop or discipline mandate:

• Karnal (Haryana) — wheat and forage crops research; historically a nucleus of the north-Indian wheat programme (before the establishment of ICAR-IIWBR at Karnal as a separate institute).
• Indore (Madhya Pradesh) — a long-standing station with a legacy in soybean, oilseeds and central-Indian cropping systems (the station's history overlaps with the emergence of soybean as a major central-Indian crop).
• Pusa, Samastipur (Bihar) — the revival station on the Institute's original 1905 site, alongside ICAR-RCER for the eastern-India cropping system.
• Wellington (Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu) — India's designated wheat rust screening nursery in the cool-humid summer hills, used for artificial inoculation with stripe, leaf and stem rust races (including the Ug99 stem rust lineage that emerged from Uganda in 1998–99) and a critical node in India's rust surveillance for the north-Indian wheat belt.
• Katrain (Kullu Valley, Himachal Pradesh) — off-season vegetable seed production and Nucleus / Breeder seed multiplication for cool-season vegetables and seed potato.
• Amartara Cottage, Shimla — high-altitude vegetable and floriculture research.
• Karsog (Mandi district, Himachal Pradesh) — hill-crops research and seed production sub-station.
• Kalimpong (West Bengal) — eastern-Himalayan seed production and horticulture station.
• Aduthurai (Tamil Nadu) — Cauvery delta rice research sub-station.

The Wellington station's role in wheat rust screening — and its contribution to the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) and the CIMMYT rust-monitoring pipeline — is why IARI is internationally recognised as a collaborating site for the global wheat rust surveillance network.

AICRP and the national breeding pipeline

IARI hosts and contributes to several ICAR All-India Coordinated Research Projects (AICRPs) — the multi-location, multi-season varietal testing framework that underpins the release of every Indian field-crop variety. IARI contributes wheat, barley, pearl millet, rice, oilseeds (rapeseed–mustard) and pulses breeding lines into the AICRP network, and its Division of Genetics provides pre-breeding stocks — biotic and abiotic stress-tolerant sources, quality traits — to the national programmes. Every “Pusa” and “HD” notified variety in the paragraphs above was released after multi-location AICRP evaluation, followed by CVRC (Central Variety Release Committee) notification for the appropriate agro-climatic zones.

Notable directors and alumni

IARI's leadership roster is a partial map of Indian agricultural science leadership:

• Dr. B.P. Pal — the first Indian Director of IARI (1950–1965), a wheat and rose breeder who steered the Institute's transition from British to Indian leadership and initiated the wheat programme that would later host Borlaug's semi-dwarf lines.
• Dr. M.S. Swaminathan — Director from 1972 to 1979, “Father of India's Green Revolution”, later founder of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai.
• Dr. H.K. Jain, Dr. Panjab Singh, Dr. R.B. Singh, Dr. R.S. Paroda, Dr. Mangala Rai, Dr. S.A. Patil, Dr. H.S. Gupta, Dr. Ravindra Kumar Singh, Dr. A.K. Singh, Dr. Ashok K. Singh — Directors who successively led the Institute through the post-Green-Revolution decades, the basmati / bio-fortification / climate-resilient breeding eras, and the transition to marker-assisted selection.
• Alumni include several Directors General of ICAR, Vice-Chancellors of India's State Agricultural Universities, and senior scientists at CGIAR institutes (IRRI, CIMMYT, ICRISAT, ICARDA, CIP).

Current directorship and updated leadership rosters are on iari.res.in — consult that site for the latest information.

Extension: Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela and farmer outreach

IARI's farmer-facing flagship is the annual Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela, typically held over three to four days in late February or early March on the Pusa Campus, New Delhi. The Mela is among India's largest farmer-scientist interfaces, drawing well over 100,000 farmer visitors from Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and further afield. It showcases newly-released Pusa varieties (wheat, basmati rice, mustard, vegetables), Pusa-branded farm implements (Pusa Straw Management System / Pusa Decomposer for crop-residue management, protected-cultivation kits, water-management devices), stalls from ICAR sister institutes, agri-input firms and FPOs, and technical sessions and one-on-one consultations with IARI scientists. Admission is free and open — farmers and FPO representatives can plan visits around the annual schedule announced on iari.res.in.

Beyond the Mela, IARI runs demonstration and training programmes for farmers through its own Krishi Vigyan Kendra at Shikohpur, Gurugram (Haryana), and interfaces with the wider Krishi Vigyan Kendra network coordinated zone-wise by the eleven ATARIs. IARI-bred varieties enter farmer fields through the SAU / ICAR seed chain, State Seed Corporations, private seed companies and, for seed-village-level multiplication, through BBSSL-linked cooperative networks. The IARI Institute Publication programme and the “Pusa Agriculture” magazine round out the extension output.

ICAR-NCIPM on the IARI campus

The ICAR National Centre for Integrated Pest Management (ICAR-NCIPM) — the national research anchor for Integrated Pest Management — is co-located on the IARI campus in New Delhi. NCIPM leads the crop-wise IPM package research pipeline (rice, cotton, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables) and pest-forecasting models that state agriculture departments and KVKs operationalise through NIPHMtraining and the CIPMC field network. IARI's Divisions of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology collaborate with NCIPM on the genetic and biological base of pest-and-disease resistance, and IARI-bred varieties often come pre-packaged with tested IPM protocols. For the farmer-facing IPM framework see our Integrated Pest Management (IPM) reference.

International collaborations

IARI is a designated collaborating site of CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) for wheat and maize research, and contributes to the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI)wheat rust surveillance network through the Wellington regional station. It hosts scientists on CGIAR exchanges, runs joint bilateral programmes with agricultural research systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Japan, and provides M.Sc. / Ph.D. seats to international students under DA&FW / ICAR / ITEC fellowship channels. Wheat lines from IARI are routinely evaluated in CIMMYT's international nurseries, and CIMMYT-derived germplasm is a standard input into the IARI wheat breeding pipeline.

Where IARI sits in the ICAR ecosystem

IARI is the flagship of ICAR's national research architecture — one of a handful of ICAR institutes conferred Deemed-to-be University status (alongside IVRI at Izatnagar, NDRI at Karnal and CIFE at Mumbai). Together with its sister Deemed-Universities, IARI anchors the postgraduate pipeline that feeds the wider ICAR network of 100+ research institutes, 65 State Agricultural Universities and the 731+ KVK farm-science centres coordinated zone-wise by the eleven ATARIs. In the plant-protection stack, IARI's core research feeds through ICAR-NCIPM (on the IARI campus) into the training curriculum at NIPHM at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, which in turn trains state officials and Farmer Field School facilitators who deliver Integrated Pest Management on the ground. IARI-bred basmati and wheat cultivars underpin the export and food-security basket that APEDA and FCIoperationalise. And IARI's agricultural-extension curriculum links directly to MANAGE-anchored SAMETI training for state extension staff.

How different stakeholders engage with IARI

1. Prospective postgraduate students: apply through the ICAR-AIEEA / AICE PG entrance conducted by NTA; consult iari.res.in for the current disciplines, hostel arrangements and fellowship (JRF / SRF) rates.
2. Farmers, FPOs and seed producers: visit the annual Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela; source Pusa-notified breeder / foundation seed via State Seed Corporations, ICAR / SAU seed chains and BBSSL-linked cooperatives; use the farmer-facing Pusa Decomposer for paddy-residue management (see our crop-residue management reference).
3. State agriculture departments and extension officers: integrate IARI-notified varieties into district package-of-practice recommendations; nominate officers to IARI short-courses and training programmes; converge with NIPHM and MANAGE curricula.
4. KVKs and ATARIs: pick up newly-released Pusa varieties, seed multiplication protocols and IPM packages from IARI and NCIPM for On-Farm Testing and Frontline Demonstrations; zone-wise coordination through ATARIs and the district KVK network — with the district-search directory at /krishi-vigyan-kendras.
5. National mission-mode programmes: NFSM (foodgrains), NMEO-Oilseeds, PKVY and NMNF (organic and natural farming), Soil Health Card, Nano-fertilizers and PMFBY (crop insurance) all rely on IARI-bred varieties, IARI soil-and-water protocols and IARI pest-and-disease packages as their scientific base.
6. International researchers and CGIAR centres: exchange germplasm and rust-screening data with IARI Wellington and the Division of Genetics via CIMMYT, BGRI, IRRI and ICRISAT protocols.
7. Media and policymakers: IARI is the go-to institutional voice on wheat and basmati production outlook, rust surveillance and seed-technology policy.

Related pages

References

• iari.res.in — IARI corporate portal: divisions, Post Graduate School (M.Sc. / Ph.D. admissions), notified varieties, Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela calendar, Annual Report and regional station directory.
• icar.org.in — Indian Council of Agricultural Research portal: DARE / ICAR structure, ICAR Deemed Universities, DDG (Crop Science) division under which IARI sits.
• agriwelfare.gov.in — Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, the parent Ministry of the DARE / ICAR system that IARI reports through.
• iiwbr.icar.gov.in — ICAR-IIWBR, Karnal — the sister national wheat institute that runs national wheat rust surveillance alongside IARI Wellington.
• ncipm.icar.gov.in — ICAR-NCIPM, National Centre for Integrated Pest Management, co-located on the IARI campus.
• apeda.gov.in — APEDA basmati-export data and GI-registration notifications, the downstream export interface for the Pusa Basmati programme.
• Press Information Bureau (PIB) — releases on IARI variety notifications, Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela, IARI directorship changes and wheat / basmati production outlooks.

Frequently asked questions

When was IARI founded and by whom?

IARI was founded in 1905 as the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa in Bihar, on a grant from the American philanthropist Henry Phipps of Pittsburgh (a contemporary of Andrew Carnegie), with land contributed by the Government of India. It was Lord Curzon's viceroyalty flagship for scientific agriculture in British India and is India's oldest formally constituted agricultural research institute. After independence it was renamed the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and, from 1958, conferred Deemed-to-be University status under Section 3 of the UGC Act 1956. It now operates under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India.

Why did IARI move from Pusa in Bihar to New Delhi?

The Bihar–Nepal earthquake of 15 January 1934, a magnitude ~8.0 event that devastated north Bihar and southern Nepal, damaged the original Pusa (Bihar) campus buildings so severely that the Government of India decided to relocate the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute rather than rebuild in place. A new campus was developed at Pusa Road, New Delhi, on roughly 500 acres between the Ring Road and Pusa Road, and the institute shifted to New Delhi in 1936. The Delhi campus retained the Pusa name, and a satellite station — later revived as ICAR-RCER (Research Complex for Eastern Region) with an IARI regional station — continues at the original Pusa (Samastipur district, Bihar) site.

What was IARI's role in the Green Revolution?

IARI was the primary Indian institutional partner of Dr. Norman Borlaug's CIMMYT wheat programme in the mid-1960s. Dr. M.S. Swaminathan — then a wheat breeder at IARI, and later Director from 1972 to 1979 — led the Indian selection, adaptation and multiplication of the Mexican semi-dwarf wheats. IARI-bred wheat varieties Kalyansona and Sonalika, both released in 1967, were the workhorse cultivars of the first Green Revolution wave in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. IARI's wheat pipeline has continued to lead Indian wheat improvement — the widely-adopted HD-2329 (1985), HD-2967 (2011, for many years the most-grown wheat variety in India) and HD-3086 / HD-3226 lines were all bred at IARI. IARI's genetics and breeding for wheat sit inside a national pipeline anchored also by ICAR-IIWBR (Karnal).

Is IARI a university? What degrees does it offer?

Yes — IARI has been a Deemed-to-be University since 1958, under Section 3 of the UGC Act 1956. Its Post Graduate School, established the same year, is one of the oldest agricultural graduate schools in India and offers M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees across roughly 25 disciplines mapped to IARI's divisions — Agronomy, Genetics, Plant Physiology, Plant Pathology, Entomology, Nematology, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Agricultural Physics, Environment Science, Horticulture, Post-Harvest Technology, Seed Science and Technology, Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Water Science and Technology, Agricultural Extension, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Statistics and more. Admission is through the ICAR-AIEEA / ICAR-AICE PG entrance examinations conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), and eligibility, syllabus and hostel details are on iari.res.in.

Which is the most-planted Pusa Basmati variety and what did IARI contribute to basmati?

Pusa Basmati 1121, released by IARI in 2003, has for many years been the workhorse of India's basmati export basket and accounts for a very large share of India's basmati export volumes. The Pusa Basmati programme, anchored at IARI's Division of Genetics under leadership including Dr. V.P. Singh and later Dr. A.K. Singh, released Pusa Basmati 1 in 1989, Pusa Basmati 1121 in 2003 (extra-long slender grain, superior cooking quality, high length-after-cooking), Pusa Basmati 1401, and the short-duration Pusa Basmati 1509 in 2013 (early maturity, water-saving, direct-seeded rice friendly). Bacterial-blight resistant near-isogenic lines Pusa Basmati 1637 (in the 1121 background) and Pusa Basmati 1728 (in the 1401 background) followed, developed using marker-assisted selection to pyramid Xa13 and Xa21 resistance genes. Between them, the Pusa Basmati series covers the great majority of the ~2 million hectares of basmati grown in the Indo-Gangetic plains.

What is the Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela and can farmers attend?

The Pusa Krishi Vigyan Mela is IARI's annual farmer-scientist interface, held every year (typically in late February or early March) on the Pusa Campus, New Delhi. It is one of India's largest farm science fairs, routinely drawing well over 100,000 farmer visitors from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and beyond. The Mela showcases IARI's newly-released varieties (wheat, basmati rice, mustard, mungbean, vegetables), Pusa-branded farm implements, protected cultivation demonstrations, nano-fertilizer and bio-input stalls, live crop plots on Pusa Campus fields, and technical sessions. It is free and open to farmers, FPOs, seed producers and extension officers; the schedule is announced each year on iari.res.in and through ICAR / DA&FW channels.

What is the difference between IARI and ICAR?

ICAR — the Indian Council of Agricultural Research — is the apex national body for coordinating, guiding and managing agricultural research and education across India, headquartered at Krishi Bhavan and Pusa Road, New Delhi, and functioning as the executive wing of the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE). ICAR runs a network of 100+ research institutes, national bureaux, national research centres, project directorates and Deemed Universities, plus 65 State Agricultural Universities (SAUs) and the 731+ Krishi Vigyan Kendra network coordinated by the eleven ATARIs. IARI is one — the flagship — of those ICAR institutes: a Deemed-to-be University with its own campus, faculty and Post Graduate School focused on crop science, plant breeding, soil / water science and plant protection. In short, ICAR is the umbrella; IARI is the flagship laboratory-and-graduate-school inside that umbrella.

What role does IARI play in international wheat rust surveillance?

IARI's Regional Station at Wellington in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu is India's designated wheat rust screening nursery — the summer-humid, cool-hill environment is ideal for growing wheat and running artificial inoculation with stripe, leaf and stem rust races. Wellington is the field site where Indian and international wheat lines are screened for resistance to virulent stem rust races including Ug99 (TTKSK) and its lineage that emerged from Uganda in 1998–99. IARI is a collaborating site of CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) and contributes to the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) rust-monitoring pipeline. In parallel, ICAR-IIWBR at Karnal runs the national wheat rust surveillance dashboard and coordinates seed replacement of susceptible cultivars.

The 1905 Pusa (Bihar) founding, the 1934 Bihar–Nepal earthquake and 1936 relocation to New Delhi, the 1958 Deemed-University conferment, the Green Revolution wheat and Pusa Basmati rice release histories, the ~25-division academic structure and the regional-station network above draw on publicly available material on iari.res.in, icar.org.in, the CIMMYT / BGRI wheat rust reports and PIB. Variety release dates, leadership rosters and Mela schedules are periodically revised — confirm current notifications on iari.res.in before applying for admissions, seed or event participation.