The spread of basmati cultivation, beyond its traditional confines of undivided pre-Partition Punjab, Jammu, West Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, can be put down to a single phenomenon: Advances in crop breeding. The traditional tall basmati varieties like Taraori, Type-3 (Dehradooni), Basmati-386 and Basmati-370 were “photoperiod-sensitive”. They needed a short day length for flowering; the plants would simply not produce flowers until the sunshine hours fell to 12 or less. That condition was available from end-September — when the kharif paddy crop should normally commence flowering – only in the north/northwest parts of the subcontinent on either side of the Indus River. In central and southern India, the day length was 14 hours or more through October. These areas couldn’t, therefore, grow or at least had no recorded history of farming basmati in contiguous stretches. This changed, though, with the release of improved basmati varieties from the late 1980s. These strains — especially Pusa Basmati-1, Pusa-1121 and Pusa-1509, bred by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) – were not just high-yielding, but also relatively less sensitive to photoperiod or day length variations, giving more planting time flexibility. Since they could flower even when sunshine hours were long, farmers in states like Madhya Pradesh could now grow them. But as AK Singh, head of the Division of Genetics at IARI, points out, the grains from the basmati paddy cultivated in the non-traditional belts have quality issues. Basmati rice’s most distinctive trait – apart from long kernel length, linear elongation on cooking, and fluffiness – lies in its aroma, which, in turn, derives from a compound called 2-Acetyl-1-Pyrroline. The accumulation of this highly volatile compound in the grain, contributing to basmati’s characteristic fragrance, is largely a function of environmental conditions. The retention of aroma, courtesy 2-Acetyl-1-Pyrroline, is best when the flowering and grain-filling phase coincides with a cool climate, with temperatures below 30 degree Celsius during daytime and just over 20 degrees at night. These conditions are, again, obtained during October only in the traditional basmati belt. Moreover, it isn’t aroma alone. Higher temperatures during the roughly one-month period from flowering to maturity can also affect the texture and milling quality of the grain. “When temperatures are high at the time of grain-filling, the packing of the starch granules in the rice tends to be loose. So, you get grains with more chalkiness (opaque areas caused by incomplete filling) and resulting in higher percentage of broken rice during milling”, explains Singh. What all this means is that Pusa-1121 basmati can well be grown in MP or Maharashtra. But the aroma, appearance and milling quality of the grain produced from there cannot really match what one would get from the basmati grown in Amritsar, Karnal, Kathua, Kangra or Dehradun. The cooler climate during the critical crop maturity and grain-filling period in those parts cannot possibly be replicated elsewhere. And there’s little even plant breeding science can do about it.
