Kota mango variety to grow in Mughal Garden

The Mughal Garden at Rashtrapati Bhavan is now home to four mango saplings that bears fruit all throughout the year.

The saplings are innovation of a Kota farmer who developed the ‘Sadabahar Aam’ variety after years of experiments. Shrikishan Suman, 49, of Girdharpura village adopted selection method and followed it by graft technique to develop the new variety.

Last year, Shrikishan received Jagjivan Ram Abhinav Kisan Puruskar from Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh for innovative farming. President Pranab Mukherjee feted the farmer at the 9th National Grassroots Innovation Award ceremony in New Delhi earlier this month.

“The variety produces an average yield of 20 kg in the main season (June-July) and 10 kg in other two seasons. It bears flowers and fruits from the second year of grafting,” Shrikishan said. “The average weight of this mango is 150-200 gm. It has less fibrous pulp and tastes like Dasahari mango.”

In his four bighas of agricultural land, Suman has a mango nursery with 15 grafted saplings and nearly 200 mango trees. “I planted seeds of different mango varieties of which some delivered flowers in offseason, prompting me to carry out grafting of such varieties on other mango trees. I developed ‘Sadabahar Aam’ by the year 1999-2000 through grafting and continuous refinement of better varieties. Later, I contacted the Union government’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF)-India which encouraged me to apply patent for Sadabahar Aam,” he said.

Associate professor of Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Borkhera, Mahesh Punia said a sudden change in environment sometimes lead plants to bear fruits and flowers off-season. The new mango variety could be a result of multiple grafting of off-season flowering varieties, he said.