Vol. 10, Issue 6 (2021)

Author(s):
Sunil Kumar, Sandeep Kansal, Chidembra Bhardwaj, Sonia Kaushal, Rishika Dangi, Ankita Thakur and Monika Karn

Abstract:
Vegetables are the important component of the human diet because of their nutritional health benefits. In terms of vegetable production and consumption, India is right next to China being the second-highest producer and consumer in the world. In India brinjal is the 5th most important solanecious crop in term of production. Being a warm season crop its production is exposed to biotic stresses due to prevalence of congenial warm and wet weather conditions during the entire growing season. Amongst the biotic stresses, Alternaria blight of brinjal is one of the major disease which become severe under the weather conditions prevailing during the summer season. The study indicated that different biotic factors have a considerable impact on the initiation and progression of disease. The temperature ranging between 25-30 ºC, in combination with relative humidity >90% and leaf wetness of more than 20h were found favourable epidemiological parameters for initiation and progression of Alternaria blight on detached leaves, covering the major proportion of leaves after 144h of incubation period with maximum apparent rate of infection.