Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp.), endowed with rich dietary protein in its seed, provides the much needed protein requirements of predominantly vegetarian population. Pigeonpea plays an important role in providing food, shelter, medicine and other livelihood opportunities among the rural poor. The purpose of a core collection is to provide information necessary to improve the use of genetic resources in crop improvement programs.

In many crops the number of germplasm accessions in the genebanks are in several thousands. Even a core collection (consisting of 10% of total accessions) is large and becomes unwieldy to evaluate and characterize the accessions for economic traits. Hence, a mini core collection of pigeonpea, comprising 146 accessions was constituted by evaluating a core collection of 1290 accessions. Examination of data for various morphological and agronomic traits indicated that almost the entire genetic variation and a majority of coadapted gene complexes present in the core subset are preserved in the mini core subset. Due to its greatly reduced size, the mini core subset will provide a more economical starting point for proper exploitation of pigeonpea genetic resources for crop improvement for food, feed, fuel, and other agricultural and medicinal purposes.