ICAR-NBPGR deposits seeds at Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) is a safety duplicate vault on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway where it safeguards germplasm duplicates of more than 1,210,191 accessions, deposited by 93 institutes. The Seed Vault opened on 26 February 2008 and India donated five accessions to this vault in June, 2008 as goodwill gesture. ICAR-NBPGR had deposited earlier 25 accessions of pigeon pea in 2014 and 100 accessions each of rice and sorghum in year 2017. In October, 2022 India further added to its safety duplicate tally with the deposition of wheat (2180 accessions) and chickpea (887 accessions), which represented the core sets in the respective crops. This contribution to the global conservation endeavour is a major milestone in NBPGR’s PGR Management mandate.

These set of accessions comprising wheat core and chickpea core as safety duplicate were deposited by Dr T R Sharma [DDG, Crop Science] and Dr D K Yadava [ADG, Seed] ICAR, India on October 12, 2022. Information on the deposits is available at the new version of seed portal launched in 2021 (https://seedvault.nordgen.org).