Rice, a member of the grass family, feeds two thirds of the human population. Rice is decisively an Asian crop. 90 % of world yields are grown and consumed in monsoonal Asia (East and South East Asia) where rice is the staple because of its ability to tolerate excessive water conditions, both cold and warm climates. Maize and wheat fail to do so. It has adjusted itself to cool, dry land conditions and saline, alkaline, and acid sulfate soils. It has earned epithets as “grain of life” and “rice is life.”
Debates over the origin and domestication of the rice plant continue and will perhaps never be known as the crop is ancient. Archaeological and molecular studies still fail to give an exact picture.
Vavilov in 1908 considered India as the place of origin of rice on the basis of the wealth of rice varieties in the southwest of the Himalayas (Framji, 1977). Of the 150,000 estimated rice varieties of the world, more than 50,000 occur in India (Rani & Krishnaiah, 2001). On the basis of the...
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Ahuja, U., Ahuja, S.C. (2014). Rice in India. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10027-1
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