The mango season is on, and along with it the usual debate about which is the best mango variety to have. My family claims that the Banganapalli or Benishan is matchless and nothing else can come even close. My ‘sambandhi’ family claims that the best is Ratnagiri or alphonso. And friends in UP swear by the Daseri.

This debate is remarkably akin to that concerning wines, and a never ending, never to be resolved one, since India has, at the last count, over 1000 varieties of mangoes.Yes, over a thousand varieties and the list expands by the year, thanks to the ease with which grafting of mango plants occurs. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has three outstanding centres involved in mango research: the Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture at Lucknow, the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research at Bengaluru, and the Fruit Research Station at Sangareddy in Telangana. Each of these has been doing yeoman service in the cause of the mango tree and fruit over the decades. In addition, the National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology at Pusa, New Delhi has been analyzing the genome of the mango plant in order to understand its basic biology. A readable research paper has just been published from there by Dr Nagendra Singh and colleagues, titled: “The origin, diversity and genome sequence of the mango”, in the current issue of the Indian Journal of the History of Science (vol. 51, no.2, 2016), which is available free on the net................Read more

Source: The Hindu