Usage of Encapsulated Plant Growth Promoting- Microbial Consortia and Testing its Efficacy on Cajanus Cajan

From the past few decades, usage of plant growth promoting bacteria in the agricultural fields as individual inoculants is well known. But the usage of these microbial inoculants was limited due to the several disadvantages like inconsistency, survivability in different climatic conditions, host specificity etc. In the current research work, encapsulated PGP microbial consortium was designed, and its efficacy was tested in Cajanus cajan. The microbial consortium contains the plant growth promoting microbe viz. Bacillus megaterium (Microbial Type culture collection–2412), Azotobacter chroococcum (Microbial Type culture collection–3853) and Pseudomonas flourescens (Microbial Type culture collection–103) and Trichoderma viride (Microbial Type culture collection–793) and the total microbial load in the consortium was assessed to be 2.9x109. Pot trial experiment was carried out to assess the efficacy of the Encapsulated Microbial Consortium (EMC) by comparing with the untreated control. When different parameters were compared Cajanus cajan plants treated with EMC showed good results i.e shoot length (125.5 cm), shoot weight (264.2 g), root length (42.4 cm), root weight (89.4 g), no. of branches (18 no’s) and no. of pods (148 no’s). Based on these research results, the encapsulated microbial consortium showed better efficacy and can be effectively used as seed inoculants.