Kodo millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum L.) is an important drought-tolerant crop cultivated on marginal soils under diverse environmental conditions and it produces high grain yields even under limited water. It is one of the under-researched and under-utilized crops but has the potential for food and nutritional security. Currently, it is grown only in India on a limited acreage.

The Kodo millet diversity subset containing 200 accessions (including 75 accessions of core collection) was formed (Vetriventhan et al. 2019). Accessions in this set were randomly chosen from the entire collection of 665 accessions conserved at the ICRISAT genebank using the cluster information that was used to constitute the Kodo millet core collection (Upadhyaya et al., 2014). It represents 30% of the entire collection, and 26%, 37%, and 48% of the races regularis, variabilis, and irregularis, respectively.

This set can be an ideal diversity set for initiating the Kodo millet improvement program, and also genetic investigation and allele mining. This set was characterized for agronomic and grain nutrient content in the 2015 and 2016 rainy seasons at ICRISAT Patancheru, India, and trait-specific germplasm sources were identified (Vetriventhan et al. 2019).