Direct and Indirect Effects of Yield Contributing Characters on Seed Yield in Greengram (Vigna radiata (L.) Wilczek)

Abstract

The goal of the current experiment was to estimate the correlation coefficients and to study the direct and indirect effects of various yield contributing traits on seed yield in forty greengram genotypes. The experiment was carried out during Kharif 2021 in a randomized block design with three replications. Correlation studies among the characters revealed that seed yield per plant has highly positive and significant association with characters like plant height (cm) (0.438**, 0.326**), number of primary branches (0.366**, 0.387**), number of clusters per plant (0.786**, 0.669**), number of pods per plant (0.561**, 0.629**), no. of seeds/pod (0.279*, 0.222*), harvest index (%) (0.680**, 0.621**) and biological yield per plant (0.870**, 0.862**) at both genotypic and phenotypic level as per values, respectively, depicting that these are important yield contributing traits. Path coefficient analysis of various quantitative traits indicated that the days to fifty percent pod sett (0.0625, 0.0152), plant height (0.0202, 0.0224), number of pods per plant (0.0050, 0.0259), no. of seeds/pod (0.0375, 0.0046), harvest index (0.5088, 0.5113) and biological yield per plant (g) (0.7233, 0.7621) had the positive direct effect on seed yield per plant followed by days to 50% flowering (-0.0032, -0.0062) and pod length (-0.0556, -0.0011) exhibited the negative direct effect on seed yield per plant in greengram. Therefore, direct selection for these characteristics would help in isolating high-yielding genotypes from highly segregating population.