Kamala
Kamala - An Elite Rice Variety Enhanced Through Genome Editing
Background
Kamala, officially released as DRR Dhan 100, is based on Samba Mahsuri (BPT-5204), one of the most widely grown rice varieties in India, cultivated on nearly 10 percent of the country's total rice growing area. For decades, Samba Mahsuri has been a favourite among farmers and consumers alike, prized for its premium cooking and eating quality. Yet since its release in 1986, the variety has remained held back by moderate grain yield, late maturity, incomplete panicle emergence, and a weak culm that makes it prone to lodging in strong winds.
Conventional breeding struggled to fix these shortcomings. Introducing yield enhancing genes through traditional introgression repeatedly compromised the very grain quality that made Samba Mahsuri so valuable in the first place. Genome editing offered a way around this trade off, allowing researchers to fine-tune a single yield related gene with precision, without altering the rest of the variety's genetic background or its prized grain characteristics.
Kamala was developed by ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research (ICAR-IIRR) in close collaboration with Satendra Mangrauthia and Indian partner institutions. It has since been officially registered as a new rice variety in India and, containing no transgenic sequences, can in principle be approved for cultivation under current Indian regulations.
Field Trials and Impact
The performance of Kamala was validated in nationwide field trials conducted through the AICRIP (All India Coordinated Research Project on Rice) programme, spanning 18 locations across both irrigated and rainfed growing conditions over three consecutive seasons. Across these trials, Kamala achieved an average grain yield increase of 19 percent compared to its parent variety Samba Mahsuri, reaching an average of 5.37 tonnes per hectare compared to 4.5 tonnes per hectare. Alongside the higher yield, Kamala matures earlier and shows complete panicle emergence, addressing the lodging problems that had long affected Samba Mahsuri, all while retaining the same grain and cooking quality that made the original variety a farmer favourite.
For smallholder producers, these improvements translate directly into practical benefits. A higher yield from the same area of land means more income without the need for additional inputs or land, while earlier maturity gives farmers more flexibility to plan their next cropping cycle. Because Kamala keeps the grain quality that consumers and markets already expect from Samba Mahsuri, farmers can adopt it without the usual uncertainty that comes with switching to an entirely unfamiliar variety.
Since Kamala was created through precise genome editing rather than the introduction of foreign DNA, it contains no transgenic sequences. It has been officially registered as a new rice variety in India and can, in principle, be approved for cultivation under current Indian regulations, a pathway that is typically faster than for conventionally introgressed or genetically modified varieties.