Introduction
Recently, the main problem around the world agriculture is the loss of
soil quality and fertility. Due to loss of organic matter (OM) and
decomposition of different chemicals to the agricultural soil and
productivity of agricultural crops reduces. Currently, other major
problems are random industrialisation, urbanization and cutting of
natural forest. Additionally, the poor agro-waste management practices
increase the greenhouse gas emissions, random chemical use directed to
loss of soil quality and fertility along with the loss of soil
biodiversity (Abhilash et al., 2016). Furthermore, the overgrowth of
population around the world required more quality food in limited
fertile soils. For achieving this target to feed the human being needs
change in current agricultural process and practices around the world
which highly dependents on the chemical fertilizers and chemical
pesticides ( Bhardwaj et al., 2014). The uses of
chemical directly affect human health and global environment as well as
soil fertility (Mukherjee et al., 2020a). Therefore, priority should be
given to the use of plant growth promoting microorganisms (PGPM) as
biofertilizers both for the food security and sustainable crop
production by improving soil health and fertility as an eco-friendly
approach to conserve degraded land. Application of the organic manures
along with the inorganic fertilizers help to increase the soil organic
matter, soil structure, improved soil nutrient, helps to maintain the
soil cation exchange capacity and soil biological activity and
diversity, and restoration of soil (Dubey et al., 2020; Singh et al.,
2020; Saha et al., 2008). Though chemicals fertilizers and pesticides
are important input for agricultural sector to get higher yield, but
unbalance and excess application of these agrochemical affects the soil
properties, crop productivity and causes a serious health issue, land
problems such as soil degradation (Hepperly et al., 2009).
Therefore, an integrated application of biofertilizer as microbial
inoculum in the agriculture field to minimise the agrochemical use under
sustainable agricultural practices must be needed. Application of PGPM
either with seed treatment, soil application, and foliar use help to
reduce the pathogenic infection as well as induce plant growth promoting
activities (Mukherjee et al., 2020b). Till date a lot of microbial
inoculants are available in the market and the number of commercial
microbial agent’s increased spontaneously as different studies have been
conducted to verify their effectiveness
(Berg, 2009). Among all the microbial
cultures, the plant growth-promoting microbes (PGPM) are well studied
and known to promote the soil health development, induce available soil
nutrient and help in plant disease suppression (Mukherjee et al., 2020c
and 2019; Verma et al., 2014).
The application of seed endophytic bacteria in sustainable agriculture
is a burning approach but very limited studies are conducted on it
(Mukherjee et al., 2020b). Harnessing seed microbiome is considered as a
viable emerging approach to sustainably increase agriculture
productivity, soil sustainability and land development. While research
studies showed that the use of bio-inoculants didn’t show good results
in field conditions due to lack of indigenous strains and different
agro-climatic zone. Recently, it was proposed that if the bio-inoculants
were developed either from plant endophytes, core microbiota or with the
crop microbiome, the result showed significant outcomes with the
application of bioinoculants, (Mukherjee et al., 2020b; Qiu et al.,
2019). However, most of the evidence for seed microbiome came from the
molecular approaches and very few extensive field level works have been
done with the isolated seed microbes. The main functional role of these
seed endophytic microbiota is very poorly known. Currently, such types
of evidence are very less and needs systematic evaluation of the seed
microbes to support this argument. In order to manage all the
agricultural resources along with the improving soil health and quality,
yield and stability of agri-products, the present research study was
conducted on chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) at pot and field
condition in Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
This study was conducted with common market available chickpea (variety
P-362) which is a very important daily consumable protein, nutrient rich
pulse crop worldwide. In India, it use as a multipurpose crop for human
consumption as well as fodder (Yadav et al., 2017). Therefore the
sustainable management of chickpea crop in India is very essential to
attain the target of environmental sustainability. In this present study
we use chickpea seed endophytes for improving the crop production and
soil quality. Our study tried to investigate the potential role of
chickpea seed endophytes on (1) Chickpea (C. arietinum L.) crop
growth, yield, (2) the soil health and nutrients (both physicochemical,
biological properties), (3) the relation between the crop production and
soil fertility.