Impact of total lockdown due to COVID19 on the agro-economic traits of lemongrass

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic has inflicted unprecedented global unrest to every sector of mankind. Likewise, the research and development sector had its own share of disturbances due to the complete lockdown condition for a year. During this period, minimum or no activities could be carried out in the lemongrass trial and the treatments were left uncared for a year. Comparative analyses in seventeen lemongrass treatments were carried out to understand the impact of lockdown in eight agro-economic traits. Some well established and popular varieties of lemongrass (like CKP25) failed to perform well with respect to some traits while some less popular varieties (like Chirharit) performed better in same traits. Traits like survivability, clump circumference and citral content exhibited significant differences in the lemongrass treatments between the pre and post lockdown period. New natural recombinants were obtained that morphologically resembled variety CKP25 which were preserved for further investigation