PRELIMINARY NOTE ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF RICE 

 IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 



BY 



R. J. D. GRAHAM, MA., B.Sc. 



Economic Botanist, Central Provinces. 



I. — Introductory. 



Preliminary. — The work of classifying the rices of the Central 

 Provinces has been in progress during the past five years. The 

 present memoir is a summary of the work to date, and is published 

 in the hope that the results attained may prove of service to workers 

 in other parts. The materials on which the enquiry was started 

 were the rices collected from all the districts in the Central Provinces 

 for the Central Provinces and Berar Exhibition of 1908. In the 

 succeeding years this collection has been added to, largely through 

 the kindness of District Officers, till at the present time a collection 

 of 670 rices has been received. In cataloguing the specimens the 

 vernacular names by which the rice was known in its own district 

 have been made use of, and it must be clearly understood, that the 

 670 rices referred to above represent only vernacular names and 

 not necessarily distinct varieties. As a matter of fact, the ver- 

 nacular name is no guide to the identification of a rice, e.g., the same 

 vernacular is often applied to totally distinct rices in different 

 districts ; while, on the other hand, the same rice often bears different 

 names in different districts ; for example, the outstanding purple 

 rice is named NagJcemr in Chhattisgarh, Jalkesar in Jubbulpore and 

 Mahajyrasad in Nagpur. 



Area. — In 191 1-12, the most recent year for which figures are 

 available, the area under rice in the Central Piovinces was 4,780,560 

 acres out of a total of 17,961,358 under crop. In Berar 41,487 



