Research Projects

As the global population rises, the demand for food is increasing rapidly. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC, 2025), in 2024, over 295 million people across 53 countries and territories faced malnutrition and hunger issues. Compared to 2023, this data indicates a huge increase of almost 14 million people, indicating that more and more people are facing fatal hunger challenges. Agricultural productivity is the key to global food security. However, this agricultural productivity is under constant threat from various biotic and abiotic stresses. The current practices to maximise productivity include the use of chemical fertilisers and practices compromising ecosystem balance, human health, food quality and climate change. In this scenario, regenerative agriculture emerges as a viable and more eco-friendly solution to ensure global food security. Regenerative agriculture practices not only foster climate resilience and productivity but also enhance economic viability. In this regard, biofertilizers can be a powerful tool. These can be added to soil, seedlings or seed itself. Plants are most vulnerable to external (seed-borne disease, heat, temperature, etc.) and internal stresses (nutrient deficiency, hardness) at the primary stage of seed growth. Seed is an important pillar of agriculture as the efficacy of all other agricultural inputs, including chemical or bio-fertilisers, pesticides and stimulants, depends on the quality of seed. By using high-quality seeds, farmers can get up to a 30% increase in yield. Advanced seed technologies include the generation of transgenic seed through gene editing, marker-assisted selection (MAS) and seed priming (Pathania et al, 2024). While MAS is labour-intensive, the use of genetically modified seeds still has its apprehensions. Therefore, devising seed biopriming technologies is an important domain that can assure increased productivity and provide climate and biotic stress resilience with lesser cost, as this alone could be a solution for many agricultural issues (Shrivastava et al, 2024). Few bioformulations are available in the market for seed treatment, but their use is limited. Most of the bio-formulations available target a specific crop or a particular aspect of plant health and growth, e.g. Nitragin Gold® with rhizobia strains ensures effective bacterial surface attachment and colonization within the seeds, boosting nitrogen fixation in alfalfa and sweet clover (Mehnaz, 2016). In India, many single-organism formulations are present, e.g. Bioderma, Biowit X, which are used for biocontrol in seeds. They are generally produced by commercial companies and have a higher cost (Hegde et al. 2022). This has led us to investigate and identify a potent broad-range microbial consortium for seed biopriming, which is cost-effective, and at the same time, conduct studies to understand how seed biopriming will affect the plant and soil ecosystem.