A B S T R A C T Introduction Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is the 3rd largest produced food legume in the world after common bean and field pea and is widely grown in the semi-arid regions (Gaur et al., 2012). It is important pulse crop in India and contributing about~70% of the global chickpea production (FAOSTAT, 2012). It has excellent nutrition value in terms of human dietary protein. In addition to having high protein content (20-22%) (McIntosh and Topping 2000; Charles et al., 2002). The genetic diversity analysis was more useful in to identify diverse genotypes from random population (Jing et al., 2010) International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 9 Number 3 (2020) Journal homepage: To estimate the genetic diversity among the 104 chickpea genotypes, an experiment was carried out based on Augmented Randomized Complete Block Design with eight blocks in two locations during rabi seasons of 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. All the 104 chickpea genotypes were classified into 5 clusters. The inter-cluster distances were more than intracluster distances this indicates that a sufficient amount of genetic variability was present in the study material. Inter cluster D2 values ranged from to . Maximum inter cluster distance was between cluster III and IV () while minimum inter cluster distance () was observed between cluster I and II indicating presence of diversity in these clusters. | Study on genetic diversity in reference set of chickpea genotypes
