Pulses or Food legumes are a group of staple grain legume crops for meeting the protein requirement and their improvement can be a feasible approach to combat protein and micronutrient deficiencies. These wide range of food legumes such as Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus subsp. culinaris), mungbean (Vigna radiata L), pigeonpea [Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp.], urdbean (Vigna mungo L), field pea (Pisum sativum L), moth bean (V. aconitifolia L), grass pea (Lathyrus sativus L), cow pea (V. anguiculata L), horse gram (Macrotyloma usititatum L.), faba bean (Vicia faba L.), etc are cultivated with a typically low input in the semi-arid tropics (SAT) of majority of the developed and developing countries. Most of these pulses originated in the Mediterranean region which is one of the six ecological regions as documented by Harlan (1992). In the region, these crops are integral component of even subsistence agriculture. These crops hardly receive better-than-average-management practices. Less-than-ideal agricultural practices may be the result that farmers may not afford to purchase or access expensive inputs. Moreover, use of such inputs may also be risky in such areas where the risk of crop failure is very high due to lack of input responsive determinate type genotypes. As a result, yield at farmers’ fields is many fold less than what is realized in well-managed agricultural fields (Sultana et al., 2014). Crop improvement programmes, in general, have been very rewarding and efficient for high input agriculture (resource rich farmers / areas), perhaps because agricultural conditions in farmers’ fields and in agricultural research stations in which most new varieties are bred and developed are almost near to similarity. Determinate plant architecture consisting of erect pant types with appropriate number of branches demonstrate more responsiveness to fertilizer, irrigation and other inputs for enhanced yield potential in several grain legumes, for example soybean, common bean, cowpea, broad bean, pigeon pea etc. and have already been characterized as well as described. In pigeonpea plants with determinate growth habit, inflorescence is short, the apical bud develops into a flower, the sequence of inflorescence production is basi-petal (Sheldrake 1984) and flowers occur more or less in the same plane (Gupta and Kapoor 1991). However, in chickpea and many other legume crops genetics and physiological pathways for determinate growth habit, are not clear and such potential genotypes are still lacking in the world chickpea germplasm (Pundir et al. 1988). However, in a breakthrough ICAR-IARI, New Delhi is reported to have developed a true breeding determinate chickpea genotype BGD 9971 for the first time in the breeding programme (Hegde, 2011).

To the best of our knowledge none of the potential genes / QTLs regulating determinancy and other traits under consideration have been isolated and functionally validated / characterized through fine mapping / map based cloning.   For several decades, pulse breeders have focused their efforts on genetic enhancement of grain yield, resistance to major biotic and abiotic stresses, but not for determinate growth habit that hampers yield due to indeterminate growth tendencies. Pulses are naturally indeterminate, which bring about a large gap between source and sink physiological assimilation pathways for pods formation and asynchronous maturity of pods causing a high economic and yield loss as compared to inputs applied. To the best of our knowledge no focused efforts have been made till today to identify the gene (s) responsible for plant growth habit particularly determinancy in majority of the food legume crops, which is of utmost importance to transfer into pulse genotypes for development of high yielding commercial varieties. The present theme aims at approaches for discovery of new gene (s) and their mapping for desirable plant architecture – determinate growth habit. It also targets to develop a strategic method of expedited breeding cycle in controlled environment and utilize it in our research activities for shortening generation time in order to accelerate determinate chickpea development programme. There is a great potential for integrating speed breeding with modern crop breeding and utilization of genome editing tool CRISPER to validate the function of novel gene (s) technologies to recede the duration and develop the input responsive determinate type high yielding varieties of food legumes.